OTel in Practice: Power Up Your Observability with eBPF and OTel Layering

The OTel End User SIG is pleased to present "Power Up Your Observability with eBPF and OTel Layering" with Aviv Zohari, Field CTO of groundcover.

From Aviv:

"Most teams treat observability like a checkbox exercise - throw some metrics at Prometheus, sprinkle in a few logs, maybe some OTel traces if you’re fancy, and call it a day. But at scale, this patchwork falls apart.

Either you drown in irrelevant data or miss the signal entirely.

Many teams adopting eBPF-based observability are met with a compelling promise, kernel-level visibility, no code changes, and minimal overhead. For breadth, this approach works brilliantly. It delivers wide, system-level coverage with very low friction. Yet just when it seems like coverage has just about been perfected - lo and behold, there’s still more that can be unlocked with layering. Enter OpenTelemetry API.

That realization leads to a shift in mindset - the future isn’t about choosing between eBPF or OpenTelemetry API, it’s about layering them. eBPF provides low-friction, system-wide visibility, while the OpenTelemetry API enables surgically precise instrumentation of critical application flows. Together, they allow observability to go both wide and deep, combining coverage with context.

This talk walks through real-world patterns, such as: where eBPF excels, where OpenTelemetry API adds critical value, and how layering the two enables teams to move from broad visibility to truly context-rich observability without sacrificing performance or maintainability."