OpenTelemetry (OTel) is emerging as the industry standard for system observability and distributed tracing across cloud-native and distributed architectures. But where do developers fit in? With OTel’s main use case focusing on production monitoring and observability, I find that many developers are still not fully familiar with OTel. Others believe it is more of a tool for DevOps/SRE.

Microservices are powerful architectures. Yet, they are complicated ones as well. Microservices enable engineering departments to scale faster than ever, but this speed comes at the price of developer confidence. When developing microservices, it is hard for developers to understand how different services interact with each other and why a certain event occurred when and where it did.

They say that co-founding a startup is like marriage. In our case, it’s probably a long overdue one, since we’ve already been collaborating together for 18 years. Ever since we first shared a bunk bed in the army, our joint journey has included a number of milestones, like military service, living as flatmates, university, and working together. Just over a year ago we knew it was the right time.