Lightning Talks -and- Tracing Event-Based Systems with OpenTelemetry

Please note that registration via EventBrite is required for in-person or on-line attendance.

We are happy to announce that the Lightning Talks, delivered by Drew University students have returned for the October 2025 meeting. The main presentation will be delivered by Harry Kimpel, Developer Relations Engineer at New Relic.

Logan Kleva will present “What's Next? Taking Your Experiences Off the Computer”
Chris Gibbs will present “Data in the Business World: An Engineer's Perspective”
Thomas Jenkins will present “Vibecoding: Cybersecurity Nightmare?”

Tracing Event-Based Systems with OpenTelemetry

Abstract:

Ideally, you should be using distributed tracing to trace requests through your event-based system such as Kafka. It decouples producers and consumers, which means there are no direct transactions to trace between them. These systems also use asynchronous processes, which have implicit, not explicit, dependencies. That makes it challenging to understand how your microservices are working together.

However, it is possible to monitor your event-based systems with distributed tracing and OpenTelemetry. You can then analyze and visualize your traces in an open source distributed tracing tool like Jaeger or a full observability platform like New Relic. In this talk I will leverage a simple application to show how you can achieve this.

Bio:

Harry Kimpel is a passionate software craftsman with 28+ years experience in a broad spectrum of software development technologies and platforms. His main focus is on cloud-native software architectures and all major cloud environments. He has a passion for model-driven development, application modernization and Distributed Application Runtime (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.

As usual, pizza and soft drinks will be provided.