Open Observability Summit + OTel Community Day 2025

Hybrid cloud isn’t a stepping stone—it’s a destination. With 39% of CNCF survey respondents already operating in hybrid environments, this model is here to stay. But as teams pursue cloud-native architectures, many skip a critical step: developing a clear cloud strategy and an observability approach to match.
The result is predictable— widening visibility gaps, redundant tooling and data, and spiraling costs as teams try to stitch together disconnected, vendor-specific systems never meant to work in concert. Hybrid environments expose these issues quickly, especially when workloads span multiple platforms without a unified way to observe and understand them.
Modernization efforts demand open observability from the start—not as an add-on. Technologies like OpenTelemetry, Fluent Bit, and Prometheus act as connective tissue across clouds, clusters, and on-prem infrastructure, enabling standardization where it’s needed most.
This talk outlines how to center open observability in your modernization journey: where to standardize architectural layers, how to maintain a more open approach, and why these decisions have long-term payoff. 
Hybrid complexity is inevitable. Leading with open observability is how you stay in control—now and in the future.

Logs can get very expensive and often how useful all those logs are is unknown, some are but many are not. It is very difficult to know which logs are useful and how exactly they are used. With Chronosphere's Control plane for logs users can now get a comprehensive analysis of value and usage patterns, along with sophisticated recommendations and control actions that allow some or most of the value derived from those logs to be preserved. In order to achieve our goals we have enhanced Fluent Bit to be more flexible in which logs are actioned upon and will share useful future additions to it.

OpenTelemetry has accelerated the commoditization of instrumentation. Telemetry generation is becoming a solved problem, an implementation detail. But this has created a new challenge: a wealth of standardized signals with no standard meaning. Different systems instrumented with different semantics generating telemetry in their own unique language. And while signal correlation connects specific workloads, it fails when we need to understand our systems at a macro scale by joining disparate datasets.
That is, until we all agreed to speak the same language.

Just as English as a lingua franca fueled progress across the internet, OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions are providing a shared language for our systems. In this talk we’ll discuss why semantic interoperability is the real connective tissue, how it’s fueling deeper insights into our production environments, and the key role it plays in enabling the AI systems that are rapidly ushering in the next revolution of our industry.

Today, we face distributed systems of exascale complexity that far exceed human comprehension. Traditional observability tools are no longer enough. But what if we could fundamentally redefine observability?

Enter Large Language Models. LLMs aren't just tools anymore; they're becoming the entire observability toolchain.

This talk will explore compelling, real-world examples demonstrating how LLMs are redefining what's possible. The observability paradigm shift is here, enabling profound understanding, rapid prediction of actionable insights, and the realization of truly self-healing systems. Embrace the future. It's already here.

OpenTelemetry captures database operations from the client perspective, in the context of an originating resource, application and request. How can this insight be matched to observations about the database server? This talk focuses on the sqlcommenter feature in OTel which propagates trace context in SQL queries, so that client- and server-side observations can be correlated to answer questions like “is this request slow due to the state of the database” and “where are the expensive queries to this database coming from".

We’ll briefly describe the challenge of context propagation, give an overview of the current state of sqlcommenter implementation in OTel SDKs, demonstrate the enriched correlation that can be built from it, and highlight limitations and pitfalls found along the way in adapting it into our product.

This talk aims to give viewers a good understanding of the OTel sqlcommenter feature and the integrated performance insight that it makes possible.

Spotify replaced its in-house TSDB (Heroic) with VictoriaMetrics and Prometheus, achieving 10x faster query speeds and significant cost savings. The 2 year migration addressed stability, performance, and stakeholder dissatisfaction with Heroic's slow queries and bespoke nature. After evaluating alternatives, VictoriaMetrics was chosen for its speed, cost efficiency, Prometheus compatibility, and self-hosted flexibility. Challenges included migrating from Heroic's overly flexible data model and often misused HQL to Prometheus's standardized structure and best-practice PromQL, a necessary shift for improved data quality and query efficiency. The migration involved updating metric agents, adapting alert management, and a significant fleetshift. Benefits included improved dashboard loading times, faster alerting, more accurate data, and alignment with industry standards.

Just throw OpenTelemetry in your code and hope for the best - what could possibly go wrong?
OpenTelemetry is a powerful tool, but without a clear plan or governance process, chaos reigns supreme!

In this session, we’ll explore the common mistakes made when implementing OpenTelemetry, from over-instrumenting APIs to drowning in excessive traces, logs, and metrics, to why an "instrument-first, plan later" approach is a recipe for disaster.

You’ll learn how to avoid these pitfalls and build a well-structured, efficient observability strategy that provides actionable insights without overwhelming your systems. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced user, this talk will equip you with the right mindset and tools to make OpenTelemetry work for you, not against you.

Becoming a contributor to an open-source project is a transformative step in any developer's career. This session explores the journey from first-time contributor to active developer, covering best practices for navigating project communities, understanding codebases, and making meaningful contributions. Learn strategies for selecting the right project, mastering collaboration tools, and embracing the culture of open-source development. The audience will be inspired about my one year journey with the open source project OpenTelemetry and how I have built a proof of concept for it and achieved developer status for this project. By the end of this talk, the public will gain insights into the tools to become a better developer and how to build more engagement with the community.

From OTLP to OTTL, engineers are excited about a lot of things. But there is one thing that excites them above all else and that is correcting people. Welcome to “The Spec-tacular Game Show”.

In this fun game show our panelists will be given incorrect statements about the OpenTelemetry Specification or Semantic Convention. The panelists will buzz in, identify what’s wrong, and state the correction. If none of the panelists know the answer the audience will get a chance to answer to steal the point. The panelist (or audience) with the most points wins!

After each question we’ll spend a time explaining why the Spec and Semconv is the way it is and highlight how it produces the production-quality telemetry you know and love. Join us for a fun, relaxing, (snarky) panel about everyone’s favorite part of Otel!

Novice observability practitioners are often overly obsessed with performance. They might approach instrumentation with skepticism and have concerns about latency degradation or resource consumption. This talk is a primer on the topic of instrumentation overhead, and it will teach you how to think about overhead in an observability context. We will cover the causes of overhead and why overhead is so hard to measure and even harder to predict reliably. Lastly, we will present some practical techniques for understanding overhead in your environment and some strategies for coping with it.