How ThousandEyes and OpenTelemetry Are Winning Hearts at Conferences

By Antonio Jimenez Martinez, Senior Software Engineer

Figure 1: Antonio Jimenez presenting at CommitConf in Madrid.

I recently had the amazing opportunity to talk about OpenTelemetry and ThousandEyes at three conferences. It was an incredible adventure that I will never forget. The conferences included:

• CommitConf: An annual conference for Web, Cloud, and Machine Learning technologies that’s held in Madrid, Spain, from April 19–20. This year’s event featured 85 talks and had over 1,000 attendees. Sponsors included GitLab, Elastic, BBVA, Okta, Alten, and others. TCommitConf also supports innovative tech communities, such as AlmeriaTech, which I’m a part of.
• J On the Beach: An international conference that took place in Málaga, Spain, from May 8–10. The main topics covered included Microservices & Cloud, Distributed Systems, Data Science, and more. Sponsors included ClickHouse, Tinybird, Revolut, and Temporal.
• OpenSouthCode: An annual event that’s held in Málaga, Spain, from June 21–22. The event promotes and publicizes open technologies, including free software, hardware, and open source. Sponsors included Canonical, Metadev, and Mattermost.

First, why should everyone participate in conferences?

• Networking allows you to meet people with similar interests.
• Learning about new technologies and about what other companies are doing can help you gain more perspective. In the same vein, you can share your knowledge with others.
• You could meet potential candidates to add to your company’s recruitment pipeline.

But, we are here for the talk, right?

The wide industry adoption of OpenTelemetry (OTel) provided us with an opportunity to build a system that would greatly simplify the integration with ThousandEyes and enable customers to correlate data with other OpenTelemetry-compliant sources. ThousandEyes can now stream network test data to any observability backend configured by our customer, using OTel. You can find more in our documentation and this blog post.

My talk covered how ThousandEyes adopted OTel, the architecture, and the challenges we faced. I’ve included a diagram of our architecture in Figure 1 below to help you visualize it.

Figure 2: ThousandEyes Otel Collector Architecture.

The audience loved the content and asked questions about our design, scalability, cardinality, integrations with other observability backends, and our clients. You can watch the full recording of my talk here.

OpenTelemetry in a Nutshell

The talks were based on OTel (OpenTelemetry), but have you heard about OpenTelemetry before?

In case you’re not familiar with OTel, it’s an observability framework providing APIs, libraries, agents, and instrumentation that enables developers to collect and export telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces).

OTel is rapidly gaining popularity and has become the second most active project in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) landscape. It’s on every tech enthusiast’s radar; they’re all eager to learn about it and integrate it into their work.

The framework is designed to be vendor-neutral and is supported by a global community that contributes to its continuous evolution. If you’re interested in contributing, you can find more information here.

Learning, Networking and Key Takeaways

As I mentioned earlier, one of the best parts of attending a conference is all the new knowledge you gain. I included a few key takeaways from the conferences below:

• Syed Usman, from Grafana, guided us on how to have a REST API as a data source in Grafana.
• Manu Fosela, Chief Operating Officer at Lean Mind, discussed the complexities of leadership and how to handle the big challenges that come with it.
• Guillermo Ruiz and Christian Melendez from AWS led a workshop about chatbots using Generative AI.
• Diana Todea from Elastic highlighted the key parts of how to effectively conduct postmortems.
• Adrienne Braganza from Cisco shared best practices for reviewing pull requests.
• Sara San Luís Rodríguez from PlainConcept described how to observe and monitor machine learning.
• Bart Farrell “unbox” the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) from how to contribute to which project it hosts like Kubernetes and OpenTelemetry.

I also wanted to share a couple of anecdotes that stood out:

• Elastic was one of the main sponsors at CommitConf. I told them what we do with OpenTelemetry, and we discussed how our customers are using ThousandEyes and Elastic.
• At CommitConf, I also met Esteban Dorado from BBVA. He also works with OTel and metrics, and we discussed cardinality challenges.
• I was lucky to meet Raul Marin, who presented a workshop about Grafana k6. I showed him how our customer streams ThousandEyes data to Grafana using OTel.

Figure 3: Sponsor area at CommitConf Madrid.

When you first cross the door of a conference, you enter alone, but you always leave with more knowledge and new friends who share similar interests.

ThousandEyes Gaining Spotlight at Conferences

It’s quite rewarding when people see you wearing a ThousandEyes t-shirt and ask you what your company does and get fascinated about it. You might not always realize it, but by attending and speaking at conferences, you’re spreading the word about your company and your product. Those interested in trying ThousandEyes can always sign up for a 15-day free trial.

Figure 4: Antonio Jimenez with the room’s schedule in JOnTheBeach.

Want to be a part of our team? ThousandEyes is hiring! Please see our Careers page for open roles.