OpenTelemetry is a powerful tool that’s revolutionizing observability. Today, we dive into this emerging open-source standard and explore its growing role in tech.
Our special guest is Adriana Villela, a Senior Tech Leader with over 20 years of experience in software development, DevOps, and site reliability engineering (SRE). Adriana is a leader in the OpenTelemetry community as a maintainer of the OTEL End User SIG and a Senior Staff Developer Advocate. She’s also a regular conference speaker, blogger, and host of the Geeking Out podcast, where she explores all things tech with exciting guests.
In this episode, Adriana and Arin dive into the world of observability, exploring its crucial role in software applications and DevOps. They provide an in-depth analysis of OpenTelemetry, outline key components for creating reliable systems, and address the common challenges encountered during its adoption.
If you’re curious about how to stay on top of your systems and catch issues before they snowball, this episode is for you!
Resources mentioned:
Geeking Out Podcast: Kelsey Hightower
Geeking Out Podcast: Charity Majors
Geeking Out Podcast: Abby Bangser
Geeking Out Podcast: Liz Fong-Jones
About Guest:
Name: Adriana Villela
What she does: She’s a Senior Tech Leader and a Podcast Host.
Company: Lightstep
Where to find Adriana: LinkedIn | Social links
Key Insights
⚡How to create psychological safety in a team? Sometimes, the best support you can offer to your team is to avoid adding to their existing stress. Adriana explains, “I think, as a manager, just making sure that you protect your team from various people breathing down on your team members necks because how many incidents have we heard of where you’ve got the poor folks trying to resolve the incident, and then there’s all these execs jumping on whatever call and then they’re like, ‘I used to be a developer, and perhaps you could report database.’ Come on, buddy, just let the professionals do their job. So I think giving that level of protection from management is extremely important.”
⚡Is OpenTelemetry easy to adopt? OpenTelemetry is a strong choice for ensuring reliable systems through standardized observability. But there are important considerations to keep in mind. Adriana says, “It feels like a no-brainer to me to adopt OpenTelemetry because, nowadays, if you want to have reliable systems, you cannot ignore observability. And what better way to make sure that your system is observable than to instrument your code using a standard, like OpenTelemetry, where you have standardized APIs and SDKs that provide that for you? I guess the challenge is when you’re asking organizations to instrument their code, and they haven’t instrumented their code before, you are basically introducing technical debt, new technical debt into the organization, especially if they have a well-established application. So you are basically saying, ‘Hey, we need to do this, but we’re introducing new technical debt,’ and that can be a really tough pill to swallow.”
⚡AI and ML are emerging as valuable tools in observability. AI is making significant strides across various fields, including software applications. The key question is whether AI can truly replace human expertise. Adriana shares her views on AI in observability. She says, “I think I see it as an assistive technology. I don’t think anything’s really going to replace the human. But I can maybe spot some trends that we might not necessarily notice. And so having that in our tooling and say, ‘Hey, Adriana, take a look at this, this might look fishy.’ And you’d be like, ‘Oh, okay. Yeah, that might be worth digging into a little bit more.’ Or you can say, ‘No, you’re full of crap.’ But either way, it might surface stuff that you might not necessarily be aware of.”