OpenTelemetry in Practice: Kubernetes & The Collector

Collector Configuration and Troubleshooting in Kubernetes - Jessica Kerr, Honeycomb

Running your own OpenTelemetry collector gives you a lot of options. For instance, you can transmit traces from your front end to one or more backends. Kubernetes is a great place to run your OpenTelemetry collector, and there’s a published Helm chart to help with that.
But if (like me) you’re not perfectly fluent in Kubernetes, Helm, AND the collector configuration, this can be challenging. Jess will walk you through this, explaining a few of the concepts behind them and showing ways to troubleshoot when it doesn’t go smoothly.

Observability Pipelines for Kubernetes - Daniel Kim, New Relic

When doing observability, we need to collect signals from many different data sources, frameworks and programming languages. We can turn heterogeneous data across so many different signals into actionable insights through a framework like OpenTelemetry. In this talk Daniel will show you how to build an observability data pipeline using the OpenTelemetry collector and open source plugins that can perform a wide variety of data processing, such as injecting infrastructure metadata into traces and metrics, implementing tail-based sampling, and exporting data to any backend via OTLP. Finally, he will share some of the challenges with running the collector, so that you can take them into account as you build out your own observability pipeline with OpenTelemetry.

About the OpenTelemetry in Practice Series

Welcome to the OpenTelemetry in Practice series! This is a new experiment by some OpenTelemetry contributors in the End User Working Group. We’re aiming to address practical problems that commonly stop development teams from succeeding with OpenTelemetry. We’re also hoping to build stronger connections with developers focused on specific languages. Finally, we want to improve the experience of implementing OpenTelemetry in production. Each OpenTelemetry in Practice will include half an hour of demos and a half hour of open conversation about the topic. We are looking for people to join the OpenTelemetry in Practice team, as well as speakers for future events - so if you’re interested in shaping these conversations please reach out.

Our first conversation will be on August 23rd, at 10 AM PDT.