Special edition: OTel Night NYC

Join us for the first OTel Night NYC — Special Edition!

Juraci Paixão Kröhling, OpenTelemetry Governance Committee member, is passing through NYC and we couldn't let that slide.

We're bringing together end users and practitioners for real talk about running OpenTelemetry in production, war stories, lessons learned, and the kind of honest conversations that don't happen on Slack.

Seats are limited, food and drinks on us ;)

Evening Agenda

• 6:00 PM: Doors open, networking, food & drinks

• 6:30 PM: Welcome & introductions

• 6:45 PM: Talk 1 — Lesley Cordero, Staff Engineer & Tech Lead at The New York Times

Who Watches the Watchers? Open Source as Governance for Enterprise Observability.

Enterprise engineering organizations face a persistent tension: they need governance to operate at scale, but the sociotechnical cost of building governance internally — from terminology to schemas to enforcement patterns — creates friction  at exactly the moments they need to move quickly.

Open source projects offer a way through this tension. While we often think of projects like OpenTelemetry as a vendor-neutral instrumentation library, their more valuable contribution to the enterprise is the governance scaffolding they provide: semantic conventions for telemetry, a standard for context propagation, an SDK and collector specification, and a stewardship model that has already absorbed the cost of consensus-building across the industry.

In this talk, I'll walk through how OpenTelemetry's governance structures map onto the data governance problems enterprises typically try to solve in isolation, e.g. shared data specifications, context propagation between services, and the components that enforce them. I'll also talk about OpenTelemetry's own governance model, e.g. the OTEP process and SIG structure to make the case that the project is as much a governance system as a technical one. I'll close with where the enterprise still has to do its own work: enforcement, data ownership, and the joint optimization between platform teams and product engineers. (edited)

• 7:30 PM: Talk 2 — Kusha Maharshi and Devpriya Dave, Senior Software Engineers at Bloomberg

Adopting and Sustaining OpenTelemetry within an Established Telemetry Platform

OpenTelemetry has become a standard interface for telemetry data across infrastructure, libraries, and developer tooling. However, for organizations that already have mature telemetry platforms in production, adoption has often been more about integration with the existing system than replacement.

This talk discusses how Bloomberg has incorporated OpenTelemetry into an existing telemetry platform with established ingestion pipelines, storage systems, and internal telemetry formats. We'll cover some of the architecture needed to integrate OpenTelemetry signals into our existing infrastructure, including when interoperability made sense and when separate pipelines remained the more practical choice.

We will also share some ways our teams are building on top of OpenTelemetry internally once the data is available in a shared environment. Examples include using TraceState for distributed trace quota accounting, extending semantic conventions for lineage tracking, and instrumenting AI infrastructure workflows.

Finally, we will also share learnings from Bloomberg's Sustaining Open Source Series with the CNCF and the OpenTelemetry project. This initiative is designed to scale open source contribution through industry collaboration, addressing the OSS sustainability gap where demand for critical open source projects often exceeds maintainer capacity. Using a "win-win" framework that combines skilled engineering contributions, mentorship, and philanthropy matching, this program creates a repeatable model for sustainable open source stewardship.

The talk will close with results and lessons from the 10-week series, including what worked, what participants learned, and how this blueprint can be scaled into a broader network of industry stewardship anchored by open source foundations.

• 8:15 PM: Closing Remarks & Networking Continues