Harry Kimpel: Tracing Kafka with OpenTelemetry

This talk, led by Harry Kimpel, focuses on tracing requests in systems utilizing Kafka. The speaker addresses the challenges posed by Kafka's decoupled producers and consumers, as well as its asynchronous nature, which complicate traditional distributed tracing methods. Kimpel demonstrates how to effectively monitor Kafka clusters using OpenTelemetry, allowing for analysis and visualization of traces in open-source tools like Jaeger or observability platforms such as New Relic. He illustrates these concepts through a simple application, providing actionable insights for better understanding microservices interactions.