2026-09-05 –, Europasaal B
The OpenTelemetry Demo has evolved into a full CNCF observability playground. This talk shares lessons from scaling it across 20+ services, multiple signals, and tools like Envoy, Prometheus, OpenFeature, Valkey, Weaver, and shows how to use it to explore, validate, and understand real-world observability systems.
The OpenTelemetry Demo, has grown from a simple microservices example into a comprehensive observability playground powered by CNCF tools. It now includes more than 20 services, multiple programming languages, and integrations with components such as Prometheus, Envoy, NGINX, Valkey, and OpenFeature.
This talk shares a behind-the-scenes look at that evolution, including breaking changes, design decisions, and lessons learned while keeping up with a fast-moving ecosystem. The Demo has also served as a validation environment, helping uncover issues across projects like OpenTelemetry itself, OpenFeature, and Next.js.
You will learn how to use the Demo to explore telemetry signals, validate assumptions, and better understand how cloud-native components work together in practice.
Juliano Costa is a Developer Advocate at Datadog with a focus on OpenTelemetry. He is a CNCF Ambassador passionate about fostering the Cloud Native community and spreading OTel's word everywhere he goes. Juliano is an active contributor to the OpenTelemetry project and a maintainer on the OpenTelemetry Demo, as well as on the Developer Experience SIG. When he's not talking about OTel, you'll find him chasing after his energetic 3-year-old.