OTel Unplugged EU 2026 — crowd voting on sessions
Journal · · 10 min

OTel Unplugged EU 2026: Field Notes from the Instrumentation Frontier

Brussels Again, But Make It Unplugged The day after FOSDEM, about a hundred of us gathered at Sparks Meeting on Rue Ravenstein in Brussels for OTel Unplugged EU 2026 — an unconference dedicated entirely to OpenTelemetry. Purple stage lights, a mid-century auditorium with wood paneling, and the familiar buzz of people who spend their days thinking about telemetry pipelines. If you know, you know. ...

February 20, 2026 · 10 min · 2114 words · Kemal Akkoyun
eBPF Devroom at FOSDEM 2026
Journal · · 7 min

FOSDEM 2026: Even Bigger, Even Better

Another Year, Another FOSDEM FOSDEM — the annual Brussels pilgrimage. If you’ve been, you know the drill: too many talks, too little time, questionable coffee, and the kind of conversations that only happen when you pack thousands of open-source developers into a university campus in the dead of winter. This year was different for me, though. Two talks in two devrooms, three sessions at OTel Unplugged — and this time, I brought the whole family. My wife and our toddler (who has graduated from “can barely walk” to “can absolutely destroy a hotel room in under four minutes”) came along, and we turned it into a proper trip — FOSDEM, then a few days exploring Ghent and Antwerp before heading home. ...

February 13, 2026 · 7 min · 1472 words · Kemal Akkoyun
How to Instrument Go Without Changing a Single Line of Code
Talks · · 1 min

talk: How to Instrument Go Without Changing a Single Line of Code

Zero-touch observability for Go is finally becoming real. In this talk, we walk through the different strategies you can use to instrument Go applications without changing a single line of code, and what they cost you in terms of overhead, stability, and security. We compare several concrete approaches and projects: eBPF-based auto-instrumentation using OpenTelemetry’s Go auto-instrumentation agent and OBI (OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation), compile-time manipulation using tools like Orchestrion and the OpenTelemetry Compile-Time Instrumentation SIG, runtime injection via Frida/ptrace, and USDT (User Statically-Defined Tracing) probes — both via libstapsdt and a custom Go runtime fork. ...

February 1, 2026 · 1 min · 204 words · Kemal Akkoyun