Development PracticesDevelopment Practices
Conference40min
BEGINNER

The lazy developer’s guide to observing your own code

This talk empowers developers to use OpenTelemetry (OTel) for troubleshooting their own code, covering instrumentation basics, visualization tools, best practices for adding traces, metrics, and logs, a practical workflow, and common pitfalls. A live demo demonstrates the process, making observability more accessible and valuable to developers.

Virginia Diana Todea
Virginia Diana TodeaVictoriaMetrics
Adriana Villela
Adriana VillelaDynatrace
talks.description
We keep telling developers they need to instrument their own code with OpenTelemetry (OTel). When they do, it feels like they’re doing it for the benefit of others, like SREs. Observability can benefit developers too, but it feels too complicated, and as a result Observability is treated as a second-class citizen.

This talk changes that by motivating developers to troubleshoot their own code with OTel. Developers will learn:
  • Why do it?
  • Basic overview of OTel instrumentation concepts
  • Overview of desktop tooling for developers to visualize OTel data
  • How to add meaningful traces, metrics, and logs to your code with minimal changes
  • A practical, repeatable workflow for using OTel to troubleshoot code
  • Common pitfalls (like accidental high cardinality) and how to avoid them
  • A live demo putting it all together

Developers will walk away with the confidence to instrument and troubleshoot their own code with OTel.
observability
opentelemetry
instrumentation
troubleshooting
talks.speakers
Virginia Diana Todea

Virginia Diana Todea

VictoriaMetrics

Spain

Diana is a Developer Experience Engineer at VictoriaMetrics. She has worked as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer focused on Observability. She is an active member of the OpenTelemetry CNCF open source project, co-organizer of Cloud Native Days Romania, co-lead of neurodiversity working group (part of CNCF initiative merge-forward) and supports underrepresented groups in tech.
Adriana Villela

Adriana Villela

Dynatrace

Canada

Adriana Villela is a CNCF Ambassador, blogger, host of the Geeking Out Podcast, and a maintainer of the OpenTelemetry End User SIG. By day, she's a Principal Developer Advocate at Dynatrace, focusing on Observability and OpenTelemetry. By night, she climbs walls. She also loves capybaras, because they make her happy.
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