We are overdue for a vendor neutral industry wide event dedicated to our favorite topic - open observability.

Last month (June 2025) the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) ran the first-ever Open Observability Summit, bringing together the world’s best experts in the field in a day packed with talks from project maintainers, end users and practitioners.

We’re proud partners of the event, and are here to bring you the highlights from this industry-shaping event.

This special episode has two parts, one recorded onsite before the event, covering conference goals, and insights from the talk submissions, and the other recorded after the event, covering the highlights of the events and the talks. 

The guests for is episode are two observability veterans: Alok Bhide, member of the event’s content committee and head of product innovation at Chronosphere; and Henrik Rexed, developer advocate at Dynatrace, CNCF Ambassador, and host of Is It Observable podcast.

Catch up on everything you need to know from the first-ever Open Observability Summit.

You can read the recap post: https://medium.com/p/d42c8826d6a5/

Show Notes:

00:00 - intro

02:52 - Part 1 pre-event

03:40 - guest intro Alok Bhide

04:49 - a new community event for open observability

06:58 - talk submission highlights from the CFP content reviewer

12:34 - a view of the open observability stack and its use 

16:42 - Fluent Bit alignment with OpenTelemetry

20:08 - AI in observability

25:34 - Part 2 talk highlights

26:22 - Fluent Bit vs. OpenTelemetry Collector benchmark analysis

37:51 - OpenSearch 3.1 release

40:47 - eBay’s observability talk

47:00 - Kotlin SDK for OTel talk for Android developers

51:45 - Otel Collector fine-tuning talk

53:52 - Broadcom OTel use case from mobile to mainframe

56:43 - Spotify migration from in-house TSDB to VictoriaMetrics and Prometheus

58:20 - OTel Collector replacement in Rust with the Rotel project

1:00:58 - Noisy neighbors network observability

1:03:04 - rising awareness of OTel semantic conventions 

1:05:50 - outro 

Resources:

• Open Observability Summit + OTel Community Day: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-observability-summit-otel-community-day/

• eBay innovation with open source observability: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ycNhzRVSbU&list=PLj6h78yzYM2NFT2PGItX2idBf7v8fHcy7&index=35 

• More on eBay’s journey to planet-scale observability: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UsU3nRglhA&list=PLd57eY2edRXz4djMETYTm-2p8WGTdoX3D 

• Spotify talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87koDlpKDR4&list=PLj6h78yzYM2NFT2PGItX2idBf7v8fHcy7

• Kotlin SDK for OTel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=di5nhYvUh6w&list=PLj6h78yzYM2NFT2PGItX2idBf7v8fHcy7

• More on mobile observability with OTel: https://medium.com/p/2eb847c41941 

• OpenTelemtry Collector vs. Fluent Bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZho5W9L_Z8&list=PLj6h78yzYM2NFT2PGItX2idBf7v8fHcy7&index=8

• Telemetry Pipelines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d1g5ZWAc1Y&list=PLj6h78yzYM2NFT2PGItX2idBf7v8fHcy7&index=30 

• OTel Collector in Rust with Rotel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeQnP8Ct7qY&list=PLj6h78yzYM2NFT2PGItX2idBf7v8fHcy7&index=16 

• Rotel project repo: https://github.com/streamfold/rotel  

• Noisy neighbor detection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVqiOtXTEFA 

Socials:

BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/openobservability.bsky.social

Twitter: ⁠https://twitter.com/OpenObserv⁠

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/openobservability/

YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks⁠

Dotan Horovits

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Twitter: https://twitter.com/horovits 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/horovits/ 

BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/horovits.bsky.social 

Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@horovits

Henrik Rexed

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hrexed/

BlueSky: @hrexed.bsky.social

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@isitobservable 

Alok Bhide

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/albhide/