Chris Detsicas, Cisco ThousandEyes
Join us as we dive into our journey with Distributed Tracing, leveraging OpenTelemetry and Istio in a dynamic microservices landscape. An internal Observability team embarked on a mission to empower engineers with deep application insights.
This talk encapsulates our journey, challenges encountered, and critical decisions made during the adoption of OpenTelemetry tracing. We'll discuss context propagation hurdles, the significance of automatic instrumentation, and importance of testing. Furthermore, we will provide an overview of our pipeline implementation and share key examples of how enabling our tracing solution has provided critical insights, helped us troubleshoot issues more effectively, and enhanced our understanding of application performance.
Chris Detsicas is a Lead SRE within the internal Observability team at ThousandEyes (part of Cisco) where he builds and maintains logging, metrics and tracing systems to empower ThousandEyes engineers with deep insights on their infrastructure and applications. He has 10+ years of experience working on developer platforms within both public and private clouds. In the last four years he has shifted focus to Observability and has recently delved deep into tracing to bring new capabilities to client teams.
author = {Chris Detsicas},
title = {Distributed Tracing in Action: Our Journey with {OpenTelemetry}},
year = {2025},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}