OTel Unplugged EU 2026 — crowd voting on sessions

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. The format is simple: no prepared talks, no slides. Morning session brainstorming, dot-voting on topics, then self-organizing into nine rooms across four breakout slots. You vote with your feet. If a conversation isn’t working, you move. It’s chaotic, it’s honest, and it produces the kind of discussions that polished conference talks rarely achieve. ...

February 20, 2026 · 10 min · 2118 words · Kemal Akkoyun
Best Practices and Pitfalls of Instrumenting Your Cloud-Native Application

talk: Best Practices and Pitfalls of Instrumenting Your Cloud-Native Application

Observability is crucial for understanding how your application operates in real-time. Among various observability signals—such as logs, traces, and continuous profiling—metrics play a significant role. They provide sampled measurements throughout the system, essential for ensuring service quality, improving performance, scalability, debuggability, security, and enabling real-time, actionable alerting. Building observable applications begins with proper instrumentation. While the Prometheus ecosystem offers tools that simplify this process, there are still numerous opportunities for mistakes or misuse. ...

November 8, 2022 · 1 min · 174 words · Kemal Akkoyun
The Zen of Prometheus

talk: The Zen of Prometheus

Live Website: The Zen of Prometheus In modern days, we run our applications as loosely coupled microservices on distributed, elastic infrastructure as (mostly) stateless workloads. Under these circumstances, observability is the key to understanding how our applications run and behave in action to deliver highly available and resilient service. Prometheus is born in such an atmosphere as a solution to satisfy the observability needs of the cloud-native era. Among many other observability signals like logs and traces, metrics play the most substantial role. Sampled measurements observed throughout the system are crucial for monitoring the health of the applications and they enable real-time, actionable alerting. Although the tools in the Prometheus ecosystem make life a lot easier, there are still numerous possibilities to make mistakes or misuse them. ...

September 20, 2020 · 1 min · 204 words · Kemal Akkoyun