OTel in Practice: Practical Guide on OpenTelemetry Manual Instrumentation

The first step to observability is instrumentation, but that can be easier said than done. Join us as Jose Gomez-Selles, an OpenTelemetry contributor and Product Lead at VictoriaMetrics Cloud, shares his learnings with us in this session: Practical guide on OpenTelemetry Manual Instrumentation (or how to produce clean Observability by getting your hands dirty). From Jose:

Automatic instrumentation is very nice to get started, but despite the hype, it entails a severe risk of adding complexity to your debugging journeys (not to mention costs). Apart from that, you will also want to produce and observe your own metrics and logs, and see full (not broken) traces. For all of that, you need manual instrumentation.

One of the highest barriers to get started with manual instrumentation is actually… getting started! Docs, libs, standards… It can get tricky. But don’t worry. We’re here to help!

Join us as we break down the essentials of OpenTelemetry instrumentation, by crafting custom metrics, spans and logs to track the most critical parts of workflows. You’ll see how simple, well-placed instrumentation points can reveal complex system behaviors, helping you detect bottlenecks, trace errors, and understand end-to-end request flows.

Whether you’re new to observability or looking to master OpenTelemetry, this session will show you how to harness the full potential of manual instrumentation to “transform your data into actionable insights”.