Do you have a good idea what your distributed application is doing in production? Are you tired of looking at different dashboards for your front-ends and each of your services, or digging through a ton of logs just to find that one small nugget of useful debug data, or viewing metrics, but not being able to tie them to actual events?
In this talk Ken Rimple, Senior Developer Relations Advocate for Honeycomb, will explain how you can use OpenTelemetry to observe your applications, a process known as "instrumentation." Combined with continuous, small deployments, feature flags, and testing in production, OpenTelemetry is a powerful way to find out what your applications are doing, right now, without trying to reproduce production problems in a test system.
Ken will demonstrate a Spring Boot project instrumented with OpenTelemetry for Java. He'll show how to get distributed trace data across multiple services, and then view the traces in Honeycomb. Logging and metrics will also be discussed.
Ken will also discuss front-end observability, a new field that allows users to move away from Real User Metrics (RUM) tools such as Sentry and DataDog, and get traces, core web vitals, and browser session information from front-end applications all the way to the back-end, making it possible to have all teams view the same telemetry and avoid the "it's a [front-end|back-end] problem" effect.
Finally, Ken will discuss mobile telemetry using Honeycomb's open source APIs to monitor native iOS and Android applications.
Ken Rimple is a software engineer with three decades of experience who serves as a Senior Developer Relations Advocate at Honeycomb. He currently guides customers in instrumenting full stack applications and frontends such as Angular and React with OpenTelemetry, and has worked on a wide range of languages and platforms including Java and Spring.
Ken loves mentoring and teaching, and has written courses and taught developers in Java, Spring, Maven, Angular, React, and other technologies.