KubeCon North America 2024 is around the corner! This year I’m especially excited, as it’s my first KubeCon since we launched Causely. The energy at KubeCon is unmatched, and it’s a great opportunity to catch up with familiar faces and make new connections in the community.
Cloud-native and open source technologies are foundational to everything we’re building at Causely, and I’m looking forward to diving into the latest developments with observability tools that will shape the reliability of countless modern applications. We’re excited about how observability tools, such as Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Grafana Beyla, and Odigos, are improving how systems are monitored and understood. These tools will underpin the reliability engineering strategy of countless modern application environments.
In this post, I’ll unpack some of the exciting innovations happening in the open source observability space, and highlight specific talks at KubeCon 2024 I’m looking forward to attending. Add them to your schedule if this is an area you’re following too, and I’ll see you there!
What’s New in the Observability Landscape
The observability space is evolving rapidly. Several key developments with OpenTelemetry and eBPF are reshaping how we approach monitoring and tracing in distributed systems. This helps make metric collection and auto-instrumentation easier and more flexible than ever.
Prometheus and OpenTelemetry are even better together
The collaboration between Prometheus and OpenTelemetry is delivering a more cohesive experience for capturing system metrics. Here’s what’s new:
- Using the OTel Collector’s Prometheus Receiver: OpenTelemetry now allows for streamlined ingestion of Prometheus metrics, creating a more unified data pipeline.
- Exploring OTel-Native Metric Collection Options: For those deeply involved in Kubernetes monitoring, tools like Kubernetes Cluster Receiver and the Kubeletstats Receiver provide robust options for flexible metric collection.
These integrations create a powerful foundation for system insights that can fuel everything from troubleshooting to strategic infrastructure optimizations.
Odigos makes migration to OpenTelemetry easy
Transitioning from proprietary observability tools can be challenging. If you’re looking to transition from proprietary observability tools to OpenTelemetry, Odigos is a great enabler. Here’s why:
- Simplified Migration: Odigos takes the complexity out of moving to OpenTelemetry, helping reduce the friction and downtime that can accompany large-scale tooling changes.
- Access to Enhanced Capabilities: With OpenTelemetry, you gain access to a broader ecosystem, opening doors to new integrations and data visualizations that enrich your observability setup.
Streamline eBPF-based auto-instrumentation
Combining Grafana Beyla with Grafana Alloy makes eBPF-powered observability easy and minimally intrusive. Whether you’re working with standalone systems or Kubernetes clusters, this integration provides high-precision monitoring capabilities without heavy overhead.
KubeCon 2024 Deep Dives and Hands-On Sessions
The schedule at KubeCon North America 2024 will feature several sessions dedicated to observability. Here are some highlights I’m looking forward to:
- OpenTelemetry: The OpenTelemetry Hero’s Journey – Working with Open Source Observability
Takeaway: Dive into the current capabilities of OpenTelemetry, including correlated metrics, traces, and logs for a complete observability picture. The talk also addresses gaps in today’s open source observability tools. - Inspektor Gadget: eBPF for Observability, Made Easy and Approachable
Takeaway: This project lightning talk will explain how Inspektor Gadget simplifies eBPF distribution and deployment, allowing you to build fast, efficient data collection pipelines that plug into popular observability tools. - Optimizing LLM Performance in Kubernetes with OpenTelemetry
Takeaway: Speakers Ashok Chandrasekar (Google) and Liudmila Molkova (Microsoft) will help you gain practical insights into observing and optimizing Large Language Model (LLM) deployments on Kubernetes. This session covers everything from client and server tracing with OpenTelemetry to advanced autoscaling strategies. - Unifying Observability: Correlating Metrics, Traces, and Logs with Exemplars and OpenTelemetry
Takeaway: Speakers Kruthika Prasanna Simha and Charlie Le (Apple) will help attendees learn how to correlate data across metrics, traces, and logs, with exemplars. This session demonstrates practical visualization techniques in Grafana, making it easy to move from high-level metrics down to detailed traces. - Now You See Me: Tame MTTR with Real-Time Anomaly Detection
Takeaway: Speakers Kruthika Prasanna Simha and Raj Bhensadadia (Apple) will dive into the latest in real-time anomaly detection, with insights into applying machine learning to time series data in cloud-native environments.
Find Causely at KubeCon 2024!
If the above topics are also interesting to you, we’d love to meet up. At Causely, we’re passionate about helping organizations unlock the full potential of their observability data to continuously assure service reliability. We believe that flying with overwhelming volumes of observability data is just as bad as flying blind.
Here’s where you can find us at KubeCon:
- 🥂 Come to our happy hour! We’re co-hosting a happy hour with friends from NVIDIA, Alma Security, Edera, and 645 Ventures on November 12th.
- 🦈 Find the shark! Look for a shark at the show on the afternoon of November 13th. Here’s a hint: she’ll be holding something sweet.