Understanding the behaviour and performance characteristics of the software we deploy, especially distributed software, is quite tricky. While observability tooling helps, implementing vendor-specific instrumentation creates tight coupling and technical debt.

Enter OpenTelemetry: A one-stop-shop for observability instrumentation, collection and routing. It aims to solve the above problem by providing SDKs, libraries and a unified semantic model for describing telemetry signals like logs, metrics and traces. These signals can be collected, transformed and then routed to many observability backends that support the OpenTelemetry protocol - avoiding vendor lock-in and platform specific observability code.

In this workshop, we'll guide you through what OpenTelemetry is, how it works, how to instrument your Python applications to emit telemetry data, and how to ingest this data into observability backends - enabling you to make better decisions about your application's performance.