So you've built a client application and you've started sending telemetry. The information sent back by this client is vital to you, and one of the first things you care about is capturing and reporting errors. There are at least two ways to report error details in OpenTelemetry. Web applications generally place exceptions in trace spans as span events, and mobile applications send exceptions as log messages instead.
If data centres were a country, they’d rank fifth in electricity consumption by 2026. Over the past few years, the resulting carbon footprint of the technology industry has sparked the fast-growing green software movement, led by the Green Software Foundation. How can we continue to innovate software in a way that also minimises its impact on the environment? This has been a fascinating problem I’ve been exploring for a few years now.
If there was ever a year for AI observability, it was 2025. Vendors released assistants to cover a variety of use cases. Coralogix released the first agent (distinct from assistants!), Olly, an autonomous, multi-agent observability platform. The direction of travel is clear, but many vendors and users are about to run into some significant problems with their data layer.
OpenTelemetry backends provide storage, analysis, and visualization for telemetry data (traces, metrics, logs). This guide lists available OpenTelemetry-compliant backend options, categorized by use case: APM platforms, storage backends, visualization tools, and distributed tracing systems. For detailed comparison, see OpenTelemetry Backend Comparison.
Clint Sharp demonstrates how Cribl Search leverages AI to streamline incident investigation. Starting from a Slack channel, the AI builds an interactive notebook, analyzes order processing logs, and identifies suspicious traffic spikes. It connects high CPU usage to a recent Jenkins deployment, hypothesizing a supply chain attack, and ultimately recommends a rollback. This isn't a far off concept. It is the future of operations arriving right now.
Clint Sharp explains why a common model like OCSF is critical for the future of AI. Agents need standardized data to analyze information effectively on your behalf. He contrasts the traditional manual workflow of checking Slack, tickets, and wikis while asking colleagues with a future where AI fuses this human context with machine data. Instead of just search results, AI agents will hand you examined hypotheses so you know exactly where to take your investigation.
Clint Sharp explains why traditional schema-on-read systems cannot handle the query loads of the future. Agentic telemetry requires a 360-degree view, but structuring data only when you read it is too slow for AI-driven workloads. The solution is using LLMs to drive the cost of building parsers to near zero. Tools like Copilot Editor allow teams to map data to OCSF instantly, effectively building factories of parsers to handle the scale of agentic AI.