Event: North Bay Python 2023

North Bay Python is a boutique one-track conference, held in Petaluma, California. Our first events were held in 2017-2019 in a 100 year-old theatre in the city’s downtown. After a planned one-year break that’s turned into almost four years, we’re excited to return!

This year, we’re holding our conference in July, in a barn, on a ranch overlooking the Petaluma River.

Observability for You and Me with OpenTelemetry

Are you interested in dipping your toes in the cloud native observability waters, but as an engineer you are not sure where to get started with tracing problems through your microservices and application landscapes? Then this is the session for you, where we take you on your first steps in an active open-source project that offers a buffet of languages (err, Python), challenges, and opportunities for getting started with telemetry data.

The project is called OpenTelemetry, but before diving into the specifics, we’ll start with de-mystifying key concepts and terms such as observability, telemetry, instrumentation, cardinality, and percentile to lay a foundation. After understanding the nuts and bolts of observability and distributed traces, we’ll explore the openTelemetry community; its Special Interest Groups (SIGs), repositories, and how to become not only an end-user, but possibly a contributor. We will wrap up with an overview of the components of this project, such as the Collector, the OpenTelemetry protocol (OTLP), its APIs, and its SDKs.

Python in particular has lovely documentation and auto-instrumentation for the most popular frameworks! Attendees will leave with an understanding of key observability concepts, become grounded in distributed tracing terminology, be aware of the components of openTelemetry, and know how to take their first steps to an open-source contribution!