OpenTelemetry or eBPF? That is the Question - Omid Azizi, New Relic (Pixie)
Channel: CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]
Date: 2022-10-28

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OpenTelemetry or eBPF? That is the Question - Omid Azizi, New Relic (Pixie)

In the observability space, OpenTelemetry and eBPF are two technologies that have been rapidly changing the landscape. So which should you use? The OpenTelemetry project provides a rich set of tools with which teams can instrument their applications, enabling deep visibility into the application behavior. eBPF, on the other hand, has been powering instrumentation-less observability through other projects like the CNCF Pixie and Hubble projects. In this environment, users often wonder which approach they should turn to. In this session, we'll cover the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches, and show how both approaches have a role to play. We'll demonstrate how eBPF observability tools can be configured to export to OpenTelemetry collectors as automatic data sources. We'll then focus on the problem of tracing, and how request tracing works with eBPF and OpenTelemetry. In this process, we'll show how eBPF has the power to avoid some manual instrumentation; in contrast, we'll show how instrumentation is still required for true distributed tracing today. The session will wrap up with a perspective into the future of the two technologies, and what is on the horizon.