Telemetry Over Events: Developer-Friendly Instrumentation at American Express Mobile
summary
American Express Mobile rearchitects instrumentation by placing an event-based telemetry framework in front of OpenTelemetry, emitting custom events that start/stop spans, convert spans to metrics, and are asserted in UI tests at scale. The platform supports tens of millions of users and about 310 Gradle modules, reduces developer cognitive load by letting feature owners emit simple signposts, and yields cleaner, easier-to-reason-about, and more testable code while increasing telemetry adoption across Android and iOS.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Telemetry journey at AMX
- 1:05Real user monitoring startup
- 3:30Login journey complexity
- 5:16Manual instrumentation cognitive load
- 7:00Event-based spans simplification
- 9:05Events to metrics and spans
- 10:30Lessons in observability
- 12:14Open source versus custom
- 12:57Q&A
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