Inside the engine of OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation: How the injector really works

Automatic instrumentation is often presented as “just add an annotation and it works.” For platform engineers, that apparent simplicity hides a set of powerful and non-trivial mechanisms worth understanding.

In this 60-minute live demo, the speaker will look inside the OpenTelemetry Injector and explore how auto-instrumentation is applied to containerized workloads. The session will examine the key design decisions behind the injector, explain how LD_PRELOAD enables zero-code instrumentation across multiple languages, and show how instrumentation is injected at runtime without modifying application images or source code.

Using real Kubernetes workloads, the demo will cover common pitfalls, limitations, and trade-offs that matter when offering auto-instrumentation as a shared platform capability.