Understanding Kubernetes can be hard. Not only in the initial learning and understanding of the concepts, but also the aspect of keeping an overview of what is happening inside at the workloads of the cluster can be challenging. How can you quickly and easily tell if your apps are healthy, well utilised and running fine?

This talk intends to look at the various aspects of Kubernetes observability and to introduce and compares multiple Open Source tools to achieve that. The range of tools covers different observability levels and requirements of different user groups.

It starts with tools simply querying the Kubernetes API and delivering the outputs in an easy-to-understand UI, goes over the possibilities of services meshes and ends with application-side logging and monitoring. For each level of observability the user has to pay a certain price in terms of configuration and runtime overhead. In turn the quality and depth of the information is different.

The intended take-away is to get a feeling which type of tooling is the right one for a given purpose. Most options will be shown in a live demonstration. Some of the technologies have a polyglot aspect and can be applied independent of the framework. This talk has a dominant focus on JVM-based applications.

In today's modern software landscape - in the cloud-native one in particular - observability has become a critical aspect of ensuring the performance, reliability, and security of applications. OpenTelemetry, a standard and open-source observability framework, provides a unified way to collect and export telemetry data from applications and services. This hands-on lab will guide participants through the process of using OpenTelemetry to instrument a simple application, collect metrics, traces, and logs, and send them to various backends for analysis.

The lab covers the implementation and usage of OpenTelemetry into Python and Java-based applications. Each participant will get a dedicated environment.

The exercises include

• the instrumentation of a polyglot microservice application
• auto-instrumentation vs. manual instrumentation
• evaluating the collected traces, logs and metrics
• configuring a collector
• analysing the results in Jaeger

This lab is made for developers seeking a pragmatic understanding of OpenTelemetry's immediate benefits. Walk away with practical skills that can be implemented right away in your projects, and elevate your observability game in just 180 minutes.