OpenTelemetry is a free, open-source Observability Protocol. OpenTelemetry sits at the application layer, and exports Traces, Metrics, and Logs to a backend for observing. It is extremely helpful and beneficial to developers in mean "time-to-detection" and "time-to-resolution" of bugs and issues that occur at the application layer; this ranges from detecting and alerting for errors raised (such as TypeError), to finding that a specific microservice (such as AWS Lambda) ran for twice as long as usual, all the way to seeing the output of a service and comparing it to the expected output to find a bug in the logic of the service.

This talk is meant as a great eye-opening introduction into basic Monitoring and Troubleshooting code that may be running in a galaxy far, far away on a Cloud Provider’s computer. This talk is geared towards complete beginners to the Monitoring and Observability world, and to show them just how easy it is to get set up and running. No OpenTelemetry or otherwise experience is needed, just a basic understanding of Python syntax to read and understand the minimal code changes required for OpenTelemetry.