OpenObservabilityCon + OTel Community Day 2025

In the world of distributed systems and observability, spans are the fundamental building blocks that enable us to understand system performance, troubleshoot issues, and optimize our applications. But what really happens when a span is created? How does it flow through an OpenTelemetry pipeline, interact with other spans, and ultimately surface in an observability backend?

In this session, we’ll take a deep dive into the life of an OpenTelemetry span—from its birth in an instrumented application to its final visualization in an observability backend. We’ll explore the various components of OpenTelemetry that interact with spans, including tracers, processors, exporters, and propagators. Using an example application and relying on OpenTelemetry’s default configurations, we’ll follow the span’s journey step by step, gaining insight into how context propagation, data enrichment, and trace exporting work under the hood

As OpenTelemetry adoption grows, so does the volume of telemetry data. But more data doesn’t always mean more insight—it can mean more confusion, higher costs, and longer incident response times. In this session, we’ll explore how engineering teams are evolving their observability practices to manage telemetry sprawl. You’ll learn how to identify the neceesary signals to identify service impacting issues, tune observabiltiy data management strategies, and apply distributed, local processing techniques to observabilty data without losing critical context. We’ll walk through practical examples of what works (and what doesn’t) in modern observability pipelines—and how OpenTelemetry can be used more strategically to improve reliability and performance.