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World Congress 2022 • Jun 15, 2022

Telemetry without the 'Tool Tax'

Ben Greenberg

Stop paying the observability tool tax. OpenTelemetry eliminates vendor lock-in, letting your team route telemetry data anywhere with a simple YAML file—no code changes required.

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#1 about 2 min

The shift from simple web frameworks to modern complexity

Web development evolved from basic server-side scripting into highly complex engineering ecosystems.

#2 about 4 min

Four dimensions driving modern software architecture complexity

Distributed architectures, containerization, orchestration, and demanding uptime requirements necessitate advanced tooling.

#3 about 3 min

The discovery of observability and the paradox of choice

The overwhelming number of observability tools creates cognitive load for engineers seeking system health insights.

#4 about 2 min

Using OpenTelemetry as a single vendor-agnostic code dependency

Unified standards capture essential application data without locking teams into a specific backend.

#5 about 3 min

The origin story and unification of OpenTelemetry standards

OpenTracing and OpenCensus merged under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to eliminate divided instrumentation standards.

#6 about 2 min

Lowering cognitive load through unified open instrumentation standards

Open standards for metrics, logs, and traces streamline development workflows similar to API specifications.

#7 about 4 min

Core architectural components of the OpenTelemetry data pipeline

Telemetry data journeys from application code through APIs, language-specific agents, and collectors before reaching exporters.

#8 about 3 min

Differentiating between traces, spans, and aggregated application metrics

End-to-end request tracing provides deeper contextual insights compared to capturing aggregated snapshot data over time.

#9 about 2 min

Implementing tracing and metrics code with OpenTelemetry APIs

Developers can implement practical exception tracing and system load aggregation using well-documented specifications.

#10 about 2 min

Owning telemetry data to avoid backend vendor lock-in

Teams retain the freedom to route and export telemetry directly to custom solutions or external observability providers.

#11 about 2 min

Configuring telemetry data exporters through standard YAML files

Simple endpoint definitions and authorization headers stream application metrics reliably to external services.

#12 about 3 min

Reducing devops tool proliferation to prevent engineer burnout

Relying on a straightforward instrumentation standard lets developers focus purely on shipping performant code.

Matching moments

1:54 min

Defining OpenTelemetry as a standardized observability framework

Iulia Feroli Iulia Feroli · LIVE

1:24 min

Importance of OpenTelemetry in front-end web applications

Carly Richmond Carly Richmond · Europe 2026 Virtual

1:47 min

Unifying observability layers with the OpenTelemetry standard

Carly Richmond Carly Richmond · Europe 2026 Virtual

2:50 min

Standardizing telemetry extraction using the OpenTelemetry framework

Nele Uhlemann · World Congress 2023

2:15 min

Maintaining code quality with open standard observability and pipelines

Alex Laubscher Alex Laubscher +3 · World Congress 2025

5:34 min

Consolidating observability data within a unified telemetry platform

Liam Hurrell · LIVE

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Upcoming sessions on this topic

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World Congress 2026 North America

September 24, 2026 · 13:30–15:30

Stage 14

From Signal to Action: Empowering Your AI SRE with OpenTelemetry Data

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Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

September 24, 2026 · 14:10–14:40

Stage 3

Real-Time Data Platforms at Trillion-Event Scale

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Principal Engineer | Data, AI & Cybersecurity Platforms

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Open session

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September 25, 2026 · 09:00–09:30

Stage 1

Test Before Release, Enforce at Runtime: Governance for Tool-Using AI Agents

Sachin Gupta

Member of Technical Staff 2 at eBay

Sachin Gupta
Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

September 25, 2026 · 16:50–17:20

Stage 3

Your Evals Passed. Your Agent Just Emptied a Database.

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IEEE Award-Winning Researcher | Best Keynote Speaker | Sr. Software Engineer at Amazon | AI Systems & Agent Architect

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Open session

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Govern the Runtime, Not the Agent: One Control Plane for Every Model, Every Harness

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Chief Technology Officer, Docker

Tushar Jain
Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

September 24, 2026 · 11:40–12:10

Stage 5

Your Agents Need Observability Before They Need Better Models

Julia Furst Morgado

Principal Developer Relations Engineer at Dash0

Julia Furst Morgado

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