How we tricked engineers into utilizing distributed tracing
summary
Strava migrates from OpenTracing to OpenTelemetry, asking each team to bump a shared library, deploy, and test about 100 microservices themselves; that hands-on migration doubles curiosity and produces a 50% increase in adoption (roughly 30% → 50% active users). Engineers spend ~15–20 minute sessions exploring real traces for familiar services, report traces in incidents, request more instrumentation, and propose UI/tooling fixes, turning migration work into interactive, service-specific training.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction and background
- 1:30The challenge of tool adoption
- 4:36Tracing adoption history
- 6:29The OpenTelemetry migration
- 8:21Implementation and collaboration
- 10:34Analyzing the spike in usage
- 13:05Factors for success
- 15:43Strategies for future projects
- 19:28Key takeaways and conclusions
- 24:45Q&A session
related talks
28mTracing the Journey into Distributed Tracing
32mDistributed Tracing in Action: Our Journey with OpenTelemetry
31mUnderstanding Microservices with Distributed Tracing
36mPanel: OpenTelemetry...
42mObservable Applications Using OpenTelemetry
26mOpenTracing Isn't Just Tracing: Measure Twice, Instrument Once
38mPractical introduction to OpenTelemetry tracing
01h 28mUnderstanding Distributed Systems with OpenTelemetry