Walking the OpenTelemetry Tightrope:

3 common OTel problems (and how to fix them)

A great OpenTelemetry set up is about balance. The flexibility makes it powerful, but without thoughtful configuration you’ll fall off the tightrope – either into performance issues and escalating costs, or by flying blind during incidents.

OpenTelemetry is one of the most widely adopted standards for collecting telemetry as it prevents vendor lock-in and enables centralized telemetry collection, leading to richer business insights.

This guide looks at three major pain points we see all the time with developers implementing OpenTelemetry, and how they show up in Kubernetes and Lambda deployments:

• Ineffective sampling
• High-cardinality metrics
• Fragmented traces

It surfaces the mistakes teams don’t realize they’re making until it’s too late, and shows concrete, actionable ways to avoid them. You’ll walk away with instrumentation strategies and configuration choices that will keep your telemetry actionable and affordable – without losing your footing.