Distributed Tracing in Action: Our Journey with OpenTelemetry

Explore a conference talk from SREcon25 Americas where Chris Detsicas from Cisco ThousandEyes shares the journey of implementing distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry and Istio in a microservices environment. Discover how an internal Observability team worked to provide engineers with comprehensive application insights. Learn about the challenges faced during OpenTelemetry tracing adoption, including context propagation issues, the benefits of automatic instrumentation, and testing strategies. Gain valuable knowledge about pipeline implementation and see real examples of how tracing solutions have delivered critical insights, improved troubleshooting efficiency, and enhanced application performance understanding. The 32-minute presentation offers practical lessons from a real-world implementation that can be applied to your own observability initiatives.