ObservabilityCON 2023 took place in London this week, showcasing all the latest and greatest trends in open source observability. Following the opening keynote, the event featured a range of breakout sessions — led by both Grafana Labs experts and members of the Grafana OSS community — that explored observability best practices and lessons learned.

The OpenTelemetry project provides many different components and instrumentations that support different languages and telemetry signals. However, new users often find it hard to pick the right ones and configure them properly for their specific use cases. For this reason, OpenTelemetry defines the concept of a distribution, which is a tailored and customized version of OpenTelemetry components. Here at Grafana Labs, we are all-in on OpenTelemetry.

When we began offering Grafana Cloud Metrics, we set a service level agreement (SLA) for 99.5% of requests to be completed within a few seconds. So we built an alert that would go off if more than 0.5% of requests were slower than a couple of seconds within a five-minute moving window. Sounds reasonable, right?