OpenTelemetry - the future of API observability

Distributed systems, by nature, are complex and unpredictable. Failures and performance bottlenecks in such systems are inevitable—and can be difficult to isolate. In complex API-driven environments, having deep visibility into the behaviour of your APIs and subsequent applications is critical for software development teams.

OpenTelemetry, an open-source observability framework, is helping teams get end-to-end visibility into their transactions, to optimise and troubleshoot their applications more efficiently. As OpenTelemetry is becoming the new standard to generate, collect and export telemetry data to multiple observability back-ends, let’s take a look at what changes it will bring to API observability in the future.

Some of the questions we will answer in this talk:

• What is OpenTelemetry?
• How has API observability evolved over the years?
• What are the challenges with API observability and how could OpenTelemetry solve them?
• How does OpenTelemetry help API developers troubleshoot their APIs more efficiently?
• How does OpenTelemetry help API product managers get more insights from their APIs?