Making observability a first-class platform concern

In this workshop, participants will use a small microservices application as a controlled environment to examine how OpenTelemetry works end to end, from SDK instrumentation to Collector pipelines and Kubernetes operator-based deployment. Rather than focusing only on setup, the workshop analyzes architectural decisions, including why to use a Collector instead of direct export, how to structure pipelines, how operator-based instrumentation scales across namespaces, and what failure modes to expect in distributed systems.

By the end, participants will have not just a working setup, but a clearer mental model of how to design, evaluate, and operate OpenTelemetry in production-oriented Kubernetes environments.