OpenTelemetry on Android: From black box to X‑Ray
summary
Demo app instruments Android with the OpenTelemetry Java SDK, exports via OTLP over HTTP to an OpenTelemetry Collector, and visualizes correlated front‑end and back‑end traces in Grafana dashboards. The build shows startup SLOs, per‑version startup regressions, HTTP spans from Ktor, and linked backend spans so root causes are visible instead of finger‑pointing. Android SDK hits 1.0; Kotlin SDK is nascent. Metrics require permissions and are less useful; auto‑instrumentation and batching exporters keep overhead low and the end‑to‑end demo works.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00OpenTelemetry on Android intro
- 3:30Black box problem in apps
- 10:20OpenTelemetry setup in Android
- 16:02Observability methodology
- 17:47Instrumenting business ops
- 26:37Hierarchical tracing for dashboards
- 28:02App startup time monitoring
- 33:26HTTP call performance tracking
- 38:11OpenTelemetry tools landscape
- 39:56Key takeaways
- 41:02Q&A
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