Summary 

On episode 2 of the Observe It podcast, host Daniela Miao has a conversation with Austin Parker, Director of Open Source at Honeycomb and member of the OpenTelemetry governance committee. The conversation kicks off with exploring the challenges and developments in observability, focusing on OpenTelemetry. Austin shares the difficulties in making observability tools accessible and user-friendly, emphasizing the need to simplify the process for end-users, especially those who are not deeply technical. 

Austin acknowledges the issues with OpenTelemetry’s frequent changes and the learning curve associated with it, pointing out the importance of making it easier for application developers to write custom instrumentation. There is also an organizational divide where developers may not feel incentivized to care about metrics and traces, and the need for OpenTelemetry to bridge that gap. Austin envisions a future where developers seamlessly incorporate observability with having to focus on OpenTelemetry intricacies.

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About Austin Parker

Austin Parker is Director of Open Source at Honeycomb, governance committee member of OpenTelemetry, and long-time contributor to various open source observability projects. He has also authored several books on the subject, such as Distributed Tracing in Practice and the forthcoming Learning OpenTelemetry.

Daniela Miao

Author

Daniela Miao is the Co-Founder of Momento, where she’s humbled everyday by her awesome teammates! Previously, she led Platform Engineering at Lightstep, where she launched their new Metrics Product. She was also tech lead at AWS DynamoDB, and released cross-region replication. Daniela has spoken at many events including re:Invent, QCon, and Kubecon. At Momento, she works on distributed system performance, observability, security, and the intersection of engineering with business.