Ensuring the reliability of your Java applications is critical in today’s fast-paced world. But how do you identify and fix production issues before they get worse? With cloud-native applications, it can be even more difficult because you can’t log into the system to get some of the data you need. The answer lies in observability - and in particular, OpenTelemetry. In this session, I’ll show you how I used OpenTelemetry to solve several production problems. You’ll learn how I uncovered critical issues that were invisible without the right telemetry data - and how you can do the same. OpenTelemetry provides the tools you need to understand what’s happening in your application in real time, from tracking down hidden bugs to uncovering system bottlenecks. These solutions have significantly improved our applications’ performance and reliability. A key concept we will use is traces. Architecture diagrams often don’t tell the whole story, especially in microservices landscapes. I’ll show you how traces can help you build a service graph and save you hours in a crisis. A service graph gives you an overview and helps to find problems. Whether you’re new to observability or a seasoned professional, this session will give you practical insights and tools to improve your application’s observability and change the way how you handle production issues. Solving problems is much easier with the right data at your fingertips.

Interruptions in a service and no clue why it happened? Visualizations help to identify problems and give more insight into how a service actually behaved. In some situations, logging is supported, but traces that can help find root cause are missing. What if you could turn logs into traces? In this talk, OpenValue Software Engineer and SRE Cees Bos will show how to transform log files from two interacting services into custom traces and load them into Grafana, identify problems that are not visible without created traces, and then verify that the subsequent fixes worked. Problem hunting isn’t always easy, but tools like Promtail, Loki, logcli, and the trace visualization in Grafana can be used to find issues in an uncommon way if the common way is not good enough.