Unlocking Observability in Kafka-Based Systems with OpenTelemetry

Unlocking Observability in Kafka-Based Systems with OpenTelemetry
Distributed tracing is essential for tracking requests across microservices. But when it comes to Kafka’s decoupled producers, consumers, and asynchronous processes, tracing a transaction from start to finish isn’t always straightforward.
In this talk, we’ll explore how to monitor Kafka-based applications using distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry. By leveraging tools like Jaeger and New Relic, we’ll uncover how to gain a full view of your microservices, even in the face of Kafka’s asynchronous nature.
Join me for a live demo with a simple Java Spring-Boot app, where we’ll walk through both automatic and manual instrumentation to capture rich telemetry. We’ll also touch on infrastructure-level observability, pulling metrics and traces from Apache Kafka brokers and Apache Flink.
Ready to dive deep into boosting your system’s observability? Let’s make sure you can track and analyze every transaction, no matter how complex!

Referent (Harry Kimpel):
Passionate software craftsman with 27+ years experience in a broad spectrum of development technologies and platforms. Main focus on cloud-native software architectures and all major cloud environments. Passion for model-driven development, application modernization and Dapr. Observing and securing these environments are key aspects.

As a Developer Relations Engineer at New Relic, Harry helps software engineers, DevOps, SREs and operations experts to understand and implement proactive and scalable observability practices by leveraging open source technologies and the New Relic platform