OpenTelemetry Collector: What It Is, When You Need It, and When You Don’t A practical, no-fluff guide to understanding the OpenTelemetry Collector - what it does, how it works, real architecture patterns (with and without it), and how to decide if/when you should deploy one for performance, control, security, and cost efficiency.

OpenTelemetry Collector: What It Is, When You Need It, and When You Don't | Discussion

The Debug Trap: Why Smart Engineers Waste Hours on Trivial Problems Last month, I watched three senior engineers burn four hours debugging a “mysterious” Kubernetes issue that turned out to be a kubectl version upgrade. The same week, another team spent an entire…

Great lesson for all engineers: "...your first instinct shouldn’t be to understand a problem. It should be to undo whatever caused it." @anshulsao #cloudnative #observability #o11y @cncf.io @chronosphereio
www.cncf.io/blog/2025/09...

Thanks! Bookmarking this for a slow read.

Thank you!!!

Thank you so much!!!!!!
It's super early here. I'll watch with coffee once the sun is up.

It's when you can't troubleshoot the setup, and you're left with trial and error, and a need for even more coffee

Github 😍

The cat photos are priceless. Really keen to see how people are dealing with decoupling to solve complexity, especially when not everything is "pure".

Is there a chance to watch a replay somewhere please?

+1

It's great. I love how the approach relates back to SLSA and that this is fundamentally a directed acyclic graph.

Liked the 'AI hype' pop culture moment

OpenTelemetry's secret weapon | Software, thoughts, and stuff As OpenTelemetry's adoption has surged, it's drawn increasing criticism: it's complex, isn't fully matured, and its user experience can feel... unpolished. While these are valid gripes, I think we've ...

this blog is maybe one of the better pieces of writing about opentelemetry i've read from someone who doesn't work on the project

labaneilers.com/opentelemetr...

OpenTelemetry resource attributes: Best practices for Services attributes · Blog · Dash0 This blog explores how OpenTelemetry resource attributes help document which systems telemetry data describes. We cover best practices for structuring service metadata, ensuring clarity in observabili...

Optimizing OpenTelemetry Resource Attributes

The key to meaningful telemetry? Metadata. service.name is the foundation—without it, you’re just logging. Adding service.version makes rollouts easier.

🔗 Learn more in our latest blog post: s.dash0.com/-attributes

Trying to think of what processing would happen at source (home of children getting toy)... situational awareness... but this is where the analogy breaks down a bit

Toy breakages, chimney malfunctions, bio break latency, reindeer torque

This will forever be one of my favourite bird videos. A young one—fresh out of the nest—realizing that food doesn’t just magically appear in their beak anymore. Growing up is hard! 🪹🐦 #birds

But where's our Buffy content.... 😂

I hear you and I have similar needs to vent. For me, APM is the true COBOL here. #MELT should be #MELTS (S for situation). Not treating stitching situational awareness in as a first class citizen in the #observability mental model is why the zombies are able to get to their prey!

it's a good metaphor, though I think it downplays the processing at the source.

A fun idea - what if Mrs Klaus was watching Mr Klaus doing his Xmas deliveries globally with OTEL. How and why would we configure agents, collector agents, collector gateways, and where would pipelines be laid down?

Nice work. The postal analogy works pretty well. Good explanation of the delivery mechanism across the agents, collector configuration. Pity it doesn't delve into the processing differences, to explain the decoupling some more.

A starter pack of people working on interpretability / explainability of all kinds, using theoretical and/or empirical approaches.

Reply or DM if you want to be added, and help me reach others!

go.bsky.app/DZv6TSS

Plenty of reasons to join Bluesky Social these days, but if you're looking for another one, here's a Starter Pack from @dangb.me with some of my favourite humans in the #OpenTelemetry community! Also, this is not exhaustive, so let him know if you want to be in this list! go.bsky.app/ReRZXpW

I hear you!!!

This happened to me at a conference last year - all the photos I took during demo were unreadable.

😆

I found the slides, and now I'm waiting for the videos. Last year's so up, so I just need to be patient 😊

Great slides - hope it goes up somewhere so we can see the full deck

Exactly what I needed to read 😊

California Fire Facts | Governor Gavin Newsom Get the facts about the Los Angeles fires.

A very difficult month supporting LA fire response🧑‍🚒 while battling epic misinformation. Now more than ever, it’s critical to call out efforts to mislead.

Here’s what we’ve done to push back on bogus info👉🏼 gavinnewsom.com/california-f... #LAfires

Why farmers are beginning to take their government to court over climate change How a Swiss lawsuit is recasting agriculture’s role in climate policy.

Swiss farmers are suing their gov't to act on #climatechange before their farms become unviable, citing losses of 10–40% over the past 3 years

Case was initially rejected & plaintiffs are still awaiting the outcome of an appeal

But it marks a significant shift in farmers' attitudes on the issue: