OpenTelemetry for Platform Engineers: Paving the Road To Self-Service Observability

Platform engineers have a dual responsibility: keeping the infrastructure reliable and making observability effortless for developers. OpenTelemetry offers powerful, open-source standards that simplify these tasks - but knowing how to best leverage them can feel overwhelming. In this talk, we’ll demystify OpenTelemetry, with a practical focus on the Collector component, and explore how platform teams can build intuitive abstractions and automation. You’ll learn how to deploy and configure the OpenTelemetry Collector, use it to provide centralized and scalable telemetry pipelines, and discover best practices for creating developer-friendly auto-instrumentation experiences. Through practical examples and lessons learned, you’ll leave empowered to provide your developers a frictionless path to comprehensive observability.