Observability made easy - with OpenCensus-based monitoring solutions

Monitoring and observability are becoming increasingly important for Development, DevOps and operations teams. Open standards such as OpenTracing, OpenCensus or OpenMetrics allow vendor-independent collection of monitoring data. However, most tools based on these standards require manual code changes to capture the data. In many cases, however, such code changes are undesirable, annoying, or simply impossible.

In this talk, we present an open, OpenCensus-based approach that enables configuration-based, flexible and dynamic collection of monitoring data. With this approach, monitoring data can be captured without the need for code changes. By using the OpenCensus standard, flexible, tailored monitoring solutions can be created based on the collected data.

We provide insights into open observability standards and show how instrumentation can be automated. Using practical examples, we demonstrate how the collected data can be used in combination with different open monitoring tools to gain meaningful insights into the runtime behavior of software systems.

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Alexander Wert
Alexander Wert is an expert in Application Performance Management, Observability and Monitoring. Alexander is passionate about open source solutions, digital experience management and software engineering. Alexander leads the practice "Digital Experience Monitoring" at Novatec Consulting GmbH. Besides exciting projects at the customer side, he is engaged in open source APM solutions and scientific APM projects. He regularly gives talks on observability, monitoring and digital experience management topics at well-known, industrial conferences. Alexander is one of the drivers of the OpenAPM initiative, striving to reveal the potential of open source solutions to the people out there.

Jonas Kunz
Jonas Kunz is currently active as consultant at Novatec Consulting GmbH, primarily in the fields of digital experience monitoring and data engineering. As one of the main developers of the open source moniotring tool "InspectIT Ocelot" he is familiar with various technical aspects around the OpenAPM initiative as well as the Java agent technology.