Hello World, Meet the Spanimals: Observability for Beginners - Tiffany Jernigan & Matthias Haeussler

This talk introduces attendees to the fundamentals of observability through a fun and engaging approach using OpenTelemetry and the Grafana observability stack. The speakers, Tiffany Jernigan from Grafana Labs and Matthias Haeussler from CGI, explain distributed tracing and its importance in understanding request flows within multi-service systems, highlighting how it can identify issues such as latency and unexpected errors. The session features a multi-service application that generates animal facts and images using AI, illustrating the entire request process from API call to database storage. Participants will learn how to instrument Python and Java applications with OpenTelemetry and visualize metrics, logs, and traces using user-friendly open-source dashboards.