Tutorial: Exploring the Power of OpenTelemetry on Kubernetes

The tutorial explores the use of OpenTelemetry for end-to-end observability data collection on Kubernetes. Participants will learn how to instrument applications using auto-instrumentation, deploy the OpenTelemetry collector, and collect traces, metrics, and logs.

• Observability is about understanding applications by looking at metrics, logs, and traces
• OpenTelemetry is a neutral approach to ship telemetry data
• The OpenTelemetry project includes a specification, API, SDK, data model, tools for generating traces, and a collector
• The OpenTelemetry collector can be run on Kubernetes or locally
• The tutorial covers manual and automatic instrumentation
• The OpenTelemetry operator can be used to integrate with Prometheus and get logs from nodes

During the tutorial, participants will use a front-end application to learn about manual instrumentation in Node.js. They will initialize the node SDK and use the instrumentation library for Express and HTTP to make the application observable.

Deploying an end-to-end observability system comes with many challenges. The organization has to decide how data will be collected, what data formats will be used, sampling strategies, filter sensitive data (a.k.a. PII), and ultimately send data to the observability platform of their choice. In this session, we will teach you how to roll out end-to-end observability data collection on Kubernetes using the OpenTelemetry project. You will learn how to effectively instrument applications using auto-instrumentation, deploy the OpenTelemetry collector, and collect traces, metrics, and logs. You will gain the knowledge needed to tackle the mentioned challenges. After this session, you will be able to understand and use OpenTelemetry instrumentation libraries, collector and Kubernetes operator.