OpenObservabilityCon + OTel Community Day 2025

In this talk, we'll introduce Rotel—an open-source OpenTelemetry collector built in Rust. Rotel is lightweight and resource-efficient, integrating seamlessly into your development workflow. Its compact design lets you package it with your Python or NodeJS projects, so telemetry collection runs alongside your code without needing additional sidecars.

We'll explore how rethinking telemetry collection at the edge can empower developers right from the early stages of development, paving the way for broader OpenTelemetry adoption. You’ll learn how Rust’s low-overhead FFI enables native extensions for telemetry filtering, transformation, and enrichment using Python and Typescript.

By leveraging Rust’s performance strengths, Rotel avoids the overhead of garbage collection, resulting in lower memory usage and reduced latency. Its quick cold start times make it a natural fit for modern cloud-native, serverless, and edge computing environments. Join us to discover how moving telemetry collection closer to the source can help you analyze high-volume, high-fidelity signals more effectively.