The Hidden Cost of Bad Telemetry: Finding and Fixing What's Hurting Your Observability

Abstract

Most organizations believe they need more telemetry. The reality? They’re drowning in bad telemetry: PII leaks, excessive spans, bloated resource attributes, and low-value traces that create noise, security risks, and costs without delivering observability value.

Drawing from experience analyzing billions of spans across production environments, this talk reveals the most common instrumentation anti-patterns and shows practical techniques to identify and eliminate them using the OpenTelemetry Collector.

Attendees will learn how to audit their telemetry quality, implement filtering and transformation pipelines, and shift from “collect everything” to “collect what matters.”