OpenObservabilityCon + OTel Community Day 2025

OTLP has become the de-facto standard for exporting telemetry in OpenTelemetry, but its reliance on networking (TCP) and batching introduces challenges-CPU contention, memory overhead, potential data loss during crashes, and complex retry and back-pressure handling.

This session explores a powerful alternative: leveraging OS-native tracing mechanisms—ETW (Event Tracing for Windows) and Linux user_events—to export telemetry synchronously via kernel-backed buffers. These mechanisms eliminate batching, network stack overhead, and retry logic, offering exceptional performance and reliability. Moreover, they are naturally suited for dynamic, on-demand telemetry, allowing telemetry to be enabled or disabled without restarts or redeployments—ideal for large-scale systems needing minimal overhead when telemetry is off.

Attendees will learn how ETW and user_events work, how they integrate with OpenTelemetry (without needing re-instrumentation), and how event listeners (e.g., the OTel Collector) can forward data via OTLP—preserving existing pipelines while gaining advanced observability features like capturing call stacks or triggering actions (e.g., process dumps) on specific events.