How To Adopt OpenTelemetry in an Enterprise Where Incumbent Vendor Tools Reign Supre... Chris Weldon
Chris Weldon
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 · Session
In this insightful KubeCon EU talk, Chris Weldon, Director of Platform Engineering at Wolters Kluwer, Tax & Accounting North America, shares the company's transformative journey from a heavily vendor-laden, monitoring-centric environment to a modern observability strategy powered by **OpenTelemetry**. The presentation details the strategic, cultural, and technical challenges encountered and overcome during this enterprise-wide shift, offering practical advice for organizations grappling with similar modernization efforts.
AI review
This talk provides a brutally honest, no-bullshit account of Wolters Kluwer's journey to adopt OpenTelemetry in a complex enterprise. Weldon pulls no punches detailing the cultural, strategic, and technical hurdles, including the often-overlooked WAF compatibility issues. The practical strategies for logging, tracing, and Collector management, coupled with the 'embedded expert' model and the compelling real-world incident that proved tracing's value, make this an invaluable case study for any organization struggling with vendor lock-in and fragmented observability. It's not a zero-day, but…