Build & DeployConference50min
Hello World, Meet the Spanimals: Observability for Beginners
This beginner session uses a playful multi-service animal facts app to demonstrate cloud-native observability with OpenTelemetry and Grafana. Attendees will learn distributed tracing, instrumentation for Python and Java, and how to visualize metrics, logs, and traces, gaining practical skills for monitoring and troubleshooting modern, multi-service systems.
Matthias HaeusslerCGI
Tiffany JerniganGrafana Labs
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Wednesday, May 6, 14:40-15:30
Room A
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What do a raccoon, a goat, and a goose have in common? They all take part in this beginner-friendly session, where we’ll use OpenTelemetry and the Grafana observability stack to easily showcase a cloud-native observability scenario.
In this session, you’ll learn what distributed tracing is, why it’s incredibly helpful for understanding how requests flow through multi-service systems, and how it can reveal issues like latency and unexpected errors — alongside logs, metrics and profiles for a complete observability picture.
We’ll walk through a multi-service application that uses AI to generate animal facts and images, tracing each request from API call to OpenAI fact and image generation to database storage. Along the way, you’ll learn how to use OpenTelemetry to instrument Python and Java applications and visualize the full request journey using easy to understand, open-source dashboards for metrics, logs and traces.
If a goat can survive cloud-native observability, so can you.
In this session, you’ll learn what distributed tracing is, why it’s incredibly helpful for understanding how requests flow through multi-service systems, and how it can reveal issues like latency and unexpected errors — alongside logs, metrics and profiles for a complete observability picture.
We’ll walk through a multi-service application that uses AI to generate animal facts and images, tracing each request from API call to OpenAI fact and image generation to database storage. Along the way, you’ll learn how to use OpenTelemetry to instrument Python and Java applications and visualize the full request journey using easy to understand, open-source dashboards for metrics, logs and traces.
If a goat can survive cloud-native observability, so can you.
Matthias Haeussler
Matthias Haeussler is VP Expert at CGI, university lecturer for distributed systems, Linux Foundation trainer, Docker Captain, and meetup organizer. His main focus is enabling people in strategy and technology for the entire cloud-native software engineering lifecycle. This includes guiding clients through hands-on implementation, overseeing deployment processes, skill enablement, and ensuring successful migrations. Previously, he was employed at Novatec and IBM R&D Germany. He has teaching experience from lectures at multiple universities in Stuttgart. He is also a frequent speaker at various national and international conferences and meetups, including Devoxx (Devoxx Champion 2024), KubeCon, Spring One Platform, Open Source Summit, Spring IO, IBM InterConnect, and WJAX.
Tiffany Jernigan
Tiffany is senior developer advocate at Grafana Labs and a CNCF Ambassador. She also formerly worked as a software developer and developer advocate at VMware, Amazon, Docker, and Intel. Prior to that, she graduated from Georgia Tech with a degree in electrical engineering. In her free time, she likes to travel and dabble in photography. You can find her at tiffanyfay.dev (and for Bluesky) and elsewhere on linktr.ee/tiffanyfay.
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