Developer Advocate with 15+ years experience consulting for many different customers, in a wide range of contexts (such as telecoms, banking, insurances, large retail and public sector). Usually working on Java/Java EE and Spring technologies, but with focused interests like Rich Internet Applications, Testing, CI/CD and DevOps. Also double as a trainer and triples as a book author.

Tracking a request’s flow across different components in distributed systems is essential. With the rise of microservices, their importance has risen to critical levels. Some proprietary tools for tracking have been used already: Jaeger and Zipkin naturally come to mind. Observability is built on three pillars: logging, metrics, and tracing. OpenTelemetry is a joint effort to bring an open standard to them. Jaeger and Zipkin joined the effort so that they are now OpenTelemetry compatible. In this talk, I’ll describe the above in more detail and showcase a (simple) use case to demo how you could benefit from OpenTelemetry in your distributed architecture.