OpenObservabilityCon + OTel Community Day 2025

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!