So you finally got your organization to invest in OpenTelemetry. You carefully evaluated observability backends and picked the perfect one. Then twelve months later, your costs have skyrocketed and you can't explain why. This talk examines how to emit meaningful telemetry while keeping costs under control, covering what to actually instrument, pipeline efficiency with OTel Arrow, sampling, filtering, and schema management with tools like Weaver.

Our Open Source Advocate, Joshua Lee, will be speaking at Kubernetes Community Days New York 2026 on June 10.
We still hear people saying, "OpenTelemetry is vendor-neutral so you can switch vendors any time you want to." This is like saying that because the vCard format exists, it's easy to switch from iOS to Android. Sure, your core data will ultimately be portable, but you'll be missing a *lot* of other things.

We're excited to share that Joshua Lee, our Open Source Advocate, will be joining the stage at Kubernetes Community Days New York 2026! He'll be part of a panel discussion on Telemetry That Matters, alongside Carol Valencia (Cloud Architect at KrolCloud and Open-Source Contributor) and Diana Todea (Developer Experience Engineer at VictoriaMetrics). The discussion will examine how zero-code instrumentation affects workflows and system understanding, how meaningful telemetry improves day-to-day engineering work, and why unfiltered or unstructured data often has the opposite effect. The conversation will cover practical lessons for filtering, dropping, reducing, and shaping telemetry.