Dude, Where’s My Error?: How OpenTelemetry Records Errors, and Why... - Adriana Villela & Reese Lee
Channel: CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]
Date: 28/03/2024

Don't miss out! Join us at our next Flagship Conference: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Salt Lake City from November 12 - 15, 2024. Connect with our current graduated, incubating, and sandbox projects as the community gathers to further the education and advancement of cloud native computing. Learn more at https://kubecon.io

Dude, Where’s My Error?: How OpenTelemetry Records Errors, and Why It Does It Like That - Adriana Villela, ServiceNow Cloud Observability (formerly Lightstep) & Reese Lee, New Relic

When an app crashes or throws an exception, these errors are not just useful, but vital, to record. However: * How an error is visualized in a backend may not be where you think it’ll be, or how you expect it to look. * Only looking at errors could mean you’re missing out on understanding your system holistically, including other failures that may be causing user dissatisfaction. In this session, Adriana & Reese will examine errors using OpenTelemetry (OTel). They will discuss how OTel records errors, how to enhance spans with metadata to streamline troubleshooting, and explore the distinction between errors and exceptions. They'll also look at how the same error is visualized in different backends, and teach about the different span kinds and how they affect error reporting. Attendees will be empowered to navigate the complexities of error handling in their software applications by leveraging OTel’s capabilities to better understand how things are working (or not) in their apps.