When Logs Tell the Whole Story: OpenTelemetry for Beginners

Failures in production are a certainty. When something goes wrong, the difference between a quick fix and a prolonged outage often comes down to whether your logs tell a clear, connected story. In this session, we’ll introduce OpenTelemetry as a language-agnostic, vendor-neutral approach to application observability. We'll start with the fundamentals—what logs, traces, and metrics are, why they matter, and how they work together—before focusing on how to use logging effectively rather than excessively. Attendees will learn how to structure logs for clarity and correlation, how trace context connects logs across services, and how to choose log levels that provide insight without noise. We’ll also cover common logging anti-patterns, including over-logging and unstructured messages, and how to avoid them to keep both troubleshooting effort and observability costs under control. Using practical, real-world examples, this session will show how OpenTelemetry logging improves debugging, incident response, and overall system understanding. Whether you’re new to observability or replacing a legacy logging approach, you’ll leave with a clear mental model and concrete best practices you can apply immediately.