OpenTelemetry & Elastic Meetup in Amsterdam

Join us for a meetup on March 27th in our Elastic office in Amsterdam! Doors open at 18.00 and the presentations begin at 18.15. Food, refreshments, and networking to follow. We wrap up around 20.30.

We are rating our talks as follows:
🟢 = Beginner content
🟡 = Intermediate content
🔵 = Expert content

Address: Elastic's office, Keizersgracht 281, 1016 ED Amsterdam

Agenda:
18.00 Doors open
18.15 5 Years of OpenTelemetry at Collibra
18.50 OpenTelemetry use @Telenet
19.25 Monitoring Applications Running on K8s with OpenTelemetry and Elastic
20.00 Networking, food with drinks
20.30 Wrap up

Talks:
5 Years of OpenTelemetry at Collibra
🟡 Collibra is an early adopter of OpenTelemetry. This talk goes over the war stories on making the telemetry backbone, and how it's playing a crucial role. We'll look at the machinery in between... the collection, the transportation, the routing, the curation. OpenTelemetry being an open specification unlocks so much more, you just need to see it. We'll discuss how Collibra uses it, what we do and how it evolved over the years, as well as the obstacles we encountered. Although this talk isn't focus is not on the backend (where Elastic is one of them), we'll go over the decisions that went into picking what backend for what signal.

Speaker: Alex Van Boxel, Principal System Architect at Collibra

OpenTelemetry use @Telenet
In this session we'll talk about:

• The need for OpenTelemetry @Telenet
• How and why did Telenet start with OpenTelemetry
• How are we currently using it and where do we see it's future in our environment

Speaker: Jo De Troy, Senior System Engineer at Telenet

Monitoring Applications Running on K8s with OpenTelemetry and Elastic
🟢 Kubernetes makes scaling applications easy, but monitoring them can be a challenge. OpenTelemetry helps by providing a standard way to collect metrics, logs, and traces—but how do you actually use it in real-world applications?In this talk, we’ll break down how the OpenTelemetry Operator simplifies observability in Kubernetes and why it’s a game-changer for developers and platform engineers. We’ll also explore how to send OpenTelemetry data to Elastic where powerful search and analytics capabilities help you quickly detect issues, find root causes, and optimize performance. To wrap things up, I’ll demo a complete setup, from deploying the OpenTelemetry Operator to monitoring an application in Elastic.

Speaker: Evelien Schellekens, Senior Solutions Architect at Elastic

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.

Jo De Troy is an IT professional with 25 years of experience in the industry. He began his career in the pharmaceutical sector before transitioning to the telecom IT industry. For the past 12 years, he has been a Senior System Engineer at Telenet, evolving from a traditional infrastructure role—focusing on Linux, Virtualization, and Automation—into the dynamic world of Platform Engineering. Last few years, he has primarily focused on Elasticsearch and Kubernetes both on-premise and in public Cloud environments.