OpenTelemetry’s mission is to enable effective observability with high-quality, portable, and ubiquitous telemetry. The Elastic Stack's native OTEL support now aligns directly with that goal, making it easier and more economical to adopt OTel without vendor-specific agents or SDKs.

This talk reviews how Observability data signals are generated in software systems, the benefits and shortcomings of OpenTelemetry 3rd party integrations, and advancements in grassroots first-party OpenTelemetry instrumentation. We’ll end with a short demo showing how to enable effective observability with OpenTelemetry and the ElasticStack.