OpenTelemetry: From Desire to Dashboard

ElixirConf · April 28, 2025, 1:00pm

ElixirConf US 2024 - James Isenhart

Welcome to ElixirConf

This talk covers the journey of implementing the OpenTelemetry project (and various OTel collectors) onto one of our company’s busiest microservices.

I begin with a brief explanation as to what OpenTelemetry is, what it aims to accomplish, and how we plan to leverage this project in our Elixir service to improve observability. There will be a quick rundown on high-level OTel concepts to help attendees better picture our implementation or otherwise familiarize themselves with the project.

I then will go over our implementation process in a lecture-friendly cadence, explaining the challenges and successes we faced along the way. Some implementation details and specific examples to drive depth will be mixed in as well, before finally showing off some of the great results we’ve been able to achieve. I expect to include high-level flow graphs of our implementation and of the project dashboards along the way.

I complete the talk with the takeaways from our team’s experience. What we loved, what we want to improve, before closing with the long-term plans for OTel at Salesloft.

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