OpenTelemetry Meetup @ Collibra

Join our next meetup at Collibra on June 4th! We will have 3 talks about OpenTelemetry and will share some food and drinks while networking

Location: Collibra, Rue Picard 11, 1000 Bruxelles

Agenda:
17:45 : Doors open
18:00 - 18:30 : Drinks and pizza
18:30 - 19:10 : Talk #1 OpenTelemery on Kubernetes with EDOT: Getting started and what's ahead
19:10 - 19:50 : Talk #2 Taming Tenancy, Cost and Architecture at Collibra Through OpenTelemetry and Our Telemetry Backbone
19:50 - 20.30 : Talk #3 Closing the Observability Gap: OpenTelemetry Meets Elastic at Telenet
20:30 : Wrap up

Talks:
#1 OpenTelemery on Kubernetes with EDOT: Getting started and what's ahead
OpenTelemetry has become the default way to instrument applications and infrastructure, and Kubernetes is one of the places where it makes most sense to use it.

This talk is a tour of OpenTelemetry on Kubernetes, focusing on the Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry (EDOT). We will explore the OTel basics (general architecture, signals) and the recommended way to deploy OTel on Kubernetes using the OpenTelemetry Operator. A live demo with an Elastic backend will showcase the correlation of metrics and logs, demonstrating how everything ties in together.

Finally, it will cover the current community effort to stabilize Kubernetes observability, including the promotion of Kubernetes attributes to release candidate status and the latest updates to the semantic conventions for Kubernetes metrics.

This session is useful for beginners trying to get into OTel, and for those running OTel in their Kubernetes cluster and trying to get some insights on what is to come.

Speaker: João Marques Correia, Software Engineer at Elastic

#2 Taming Tenancy, Cost and Architecture at Collibra Through OpenTelemetry and Our Telemetry Backbone
Operating a SaaS platform presents the same observability problems as any other enterprise, but due to the scale and tenancy, we introduce a huge multiplier on the observability signals, having an effect on cost and effectiveness.

This session dives into the techniques Collibra used to tame these problems and how to maintain clarity when infrastructure spans virtual machines, modern Kubernetes clusters, and a complex mix of single- and multi-tenant architectures. Without the right context, telemetry data becomes a noisy, indistinguishable flood.

We will dive into the architectural decision to leverage the C4 system model, ensuring every piece of telemetry carries the vital context of what it belongs to and where it sits in the hierarchy. Enabling us to gain insights into both signal attribution and allowing virtual chargebacks. The presentation details the implementation of a pipeline using custom-built OpenTelemetry collectors designed to handle the data and enrich it before sending it to the appropriate backends.

This session will give you practical insights on the challenges SaaS platforms have, but the techniques that are used to tame them can be applied everywhere.

Speaker: Alex Van Boxel, Principal System Architect at Collibra

#3 Closing the Observability Gap: OpenTelemetry Meets Elastic at Telenet
Modern systems generate more telemetry than ever, but without consistency, that data quickly becomes noise. At Telenet, we turned to OpenTelemetry to standardise how we collect and enrich observability data across our bare-metal Kubernetes clusters.

This talk dives into how we integrate OpenTelemetry into our engineering workflows and couple it with Elastic for storage, analysis, and visualisation. We’ll walk through our architecture, instrumentation strategies, and how we ensure high-quality telemetry that engineers trust. Along the way, we’ll highlight real use cases, from debugging production incidents to improving service performance, and discuss what worked, what didn’t, and what we’d do differently today.

If you're an Elastic user looking to adopt or scale OpenTelemetry, this session will help you bridge the gap between theory and practice.

Speaker: Reidar Veroft, Container Platform Engineer at Telenetgroup

Bios
Alex Van Boxel is a Principal System Architect at Collibra. With an engineering background in Research and Development at Alcatel-Lucent, Progress Software, and Veepee he loves to focus on the fundamental building blocks of the software industry. That means reading, understanding, and contributing to specifications, as well as contributing to the Open Source projects that run through our infrastructure. He is code-owner of two components of the OpenTelemetry collector.

João Marques Correia is a Software Engineer at Elastic. Having recently joined Elastic, he has been focusing on OpenTelemetry, with a bigger effort being put into Kubernetes metrics stabilization. Before joining Elastic, he worked as a Software Engineer at Cisco on a Data Center network controller. He is drawn to distributed systems, and in particular how to observe them and keep them working reliably.

Reidar Veroft is a DevOps Engineer at Telenet, where he builds observable, reliable systems that power critical infrastructure across Belgium. From the 5G core to our voice core, he focuses on making sure the systems behind Telenetgroup are not only running, but fully understood through high-quality telemetry.

Thanks to Collibra for hosting this meetup!