OpenSearchCon Europe 2025 – Building an Open Source Observability Stack from Raw Telemetry & Auto in Auto-Instrumentation? A look at current automation strategies with OTel

Conference Talk – Breakout session

OpenSearchCon Europe 2025 – Building an Open Source Observability Stack from Raw Telemetry & Auto in Auto-Instrumentation? A look at current automation strategies with OTel

OpenSearchCon Europe 2025 is the premier event for the OpenSearch community in Europe!

Our colleague, Joshua, will be presenting two amazing talks:

• Building an Open Source Observability Stack from Raw Telemetry

This session will guide you through the process of building a complete observability stack from the ground up using raw telemetry data ingested directly into a datastore, combining a variety of open-source signals, including OpenTelemetry and Prometheus formats.

We’ll start by leveraging our existing telemetry — likely logs and metrics — for maximum effectiveness, because telemetry without action is just storage. We’ll delve into the foundational aspects of creating OLAP cubes, essential for efficient data analysis and real-time insights. We’ll transform and enrich telemetry data to make it actionable, and show how to optimize storage and query performance to handle large-scale data with ease.
We’ll use this data for creating insightful visualizations with tools like Perses. I’ll show how to create well-formed time-series data even when the underlying data has gaps or varying granularity, and we’ll add robust alerting.
Drawing from experience with proprietary and open source observability tools, we’ll then evolve our monitoring by filling in instrumentation gaps and adding application telemetry. We’ll use automations like eBPF to fully observe a massively distributed cloud database offering.
This talk will equip you with the knowledge to implement a scalable, secure, and efficient open-source observability stack tailored to your unique needs. Whether you’re starting from scratch or looking to enhance your existing observability infrastructure, join me to discover practical strategies and innovative solutions that you can implement today

• Where’s the Auto in Auto-Instrumentation? A look at current automation strategies with OTel

“Automatic Instrumentation” can mean a lot of things depending on context. Whether we’re discussing the Instrumentation SDKs or full-kernel observability with eBPF, the promise is the same: end-to-end observability coverage with no custom code and minimal setup. 

First, I will review how the different mechanisms available for automatic instrumentation work within each of the 11 languages supported by OpenTelemetry. I’ll examine: 

• How code-path instrumentation works at the library level by diving into the Node.js OpenTelemetry Extension and the JavaScript libraries it supports 
• Automatic instrumentation via attachment with Java and Python 
• Automatic instrumentation injection using the OTel Operator for DotNet, Java, and NodeJS 

Finally, I’ll take a peek at the future of automatic instrumentation of compiled binaries with a look at the Go instrumentation library built using eBPF. 

In this talk will attempt to clarify the different mechanisms that are often colloquially lumped under the term “Auto-Instrumentation” and help to clarify for end users exactly what is possible within each supported language. I will answer questions that I often hear about instrumentation such as “will I need to modify my application code?”, “Will it work without Kubernetes?”, “Will I be able to use the libraries I’m currently using?”, and “How can I use this in a completely custom code base?

About the Presenter

Josh Lee – Developer Advocate @ Altinity

Whether it’s operators or observability, agile or accessibility, Josh’s expertise shines because he is passionate about all of it. He’s been building software for over a decade and loves sharing experiences via public speaking. He is a Developer Advocate for Altinity, where he helps create educational content about ClickHouse® and OpenTelemetry, and he is a contributor to the OpenTelemetry project.