Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference North America 2026

What do a raccoon, a goat, and a goose have in common? They all take part in a tracing adventure where we’ll use OpenTelemetry and the Grafana observability stack to easily showcase a cloud-native observability scenario.

In this session, you’ll learn what distributed tracing is, why it’s incredibly helpful for understanding how requests flow through multi-service systems, and how it can reveal issues like latency and unexpected errors — alongside metrics, logs, traces, and profiles for a complete observability picture.

We’ll walk through a multi-service application that uses AI to generate animal facts and images, tracing each request from API call to fact and image generation to database storage. Along the way, you’ll learn how to use OpenTelemetry to instrument Python and Java applications and visualize the full request journey using easy to understand, open-source dashboards for metrics, logs, traces, and profiles.

If a goat can survive cloud-native observability, so can you.