An Exemplary Path: Leveraging EBPFs and OpenTelemetry To Aut... Charlie Le & Kruthika Prasanna Simha

Charlie Le, Kruthika Prasanna Simha

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 · Session

In the complex landscape of modern distributed systems, debugging performance issues and identifying root causes remains a significant challenge. Traditional observability stacks often present data in silos: metrics show *what* is happening, while traces and logs detail *why* it's happening. The arduous task of manually correlating an anomalous metric spike with a specific slow trace or relevant log entry consumes valuable engineering time and delays incident resolution. This talk, "An Exemplary Path," addresses this critical problem by introducing a powerful paradigm shift: **exemplars**.

AI review

This talk presents a genuinely transformative approach to distributed system observability by leveraging eBPF for zero-code auto-instrumentation of exemplars, seamlessly linking high-level metrics to detailed traces and logs via OpenTelemetry. The speakers demonstrate a practical, impactful solution that drastically reduces Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) by enabling precision debugging, offering unprecedented visibility into black-box systems, and laying a robust foundation for advanced machine learning applications in incident management. This is a critical development for anyone serious…

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