OpenTelemetry & Distributed Tracing: A Jaeger v2 Deep Dive
OpenTelemetry (OTel) is the industry standard for observability, providing vendor-neutral APIs, SDKs, and tools to generate and collect telemetry data including traces, metrics, and logs. This session focuses specifically on OTel’s pivotal role in distributed tracing. We’ll delve into the OpenTelemetry tracing specifications, examining how they standardize trace context propagation, span formats, and data collection, enabling interoperability across complex systems. Presented by Jonah, a maintainer of Jaeger who has been involved with the OpenTelemetry project since its inception, this session showcases the power of this standard implemented in Jaeger v2. Discover how this popular distributed tracing platform has undergone a major evolution, fundamentally integrating OTel tracing into its core architecture. Learn about the key architectural advancements within Jaeger driven by this native OTel adoption, resulting in more powerful and standardized tracing capabilities. We will also cover practical deployment using the fully integrated Helm chart and Kubernetes operator, Jaeger’s future roadmap aligned with OTel, and opportunities for community contribution.
Speaker
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Jonah KowallPaesslerJonah Kowall is a technology executive recognized for his contributions across cybersecurity, IT operations, observability, and product leadership—from pioneering early security techniques to shaping analyst markets and leading product strategy at high-growth companies.
His career launched in computer science, co-founding one of the first content filtering companies in the late 1990s and making early security contributions to the FreeBSD project, including novel wireless cracking algorithms. Armed with prestigious certifications like CCIE, CISSP, and CISA, Jonah gained 15 years of hands-on experience managing infrastructure, operations, security, and performance engineering across both startups and large enterprises. During this time, he honed his expertise in monitoring and tuning high-scale infrastructure and SaaS applications.
Transitioning to industry analysis at Gartner in 2011, Jonah became a global authority on IT Operations Management (ITOM) and monitoring. He led the influential Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Magic Quadrant, created the Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics (NPMD) Magic Quadrant, and coined the term “Network Packet Broker” (NPB), significantly shaping these key markets.
In 2015, Jonah pivoted to building products, joining AppDynamics to drive corporate development and product strategy, contributing through its $3.8 billion acquisition by Cisco. He subsequently led product and engineering initiatives at innovative startups, including Kentik (network analytics) and Logz.io (CTO, observability), before focusing on broad open-source SaaS data platforms at Aiven.
Currently, Jonah serves as SVP of Product and Design at the monitoring company Paessler. He leads the product management and design teams in building the next generation of monitoring solutions for critical IT and OT environments.
Jonah remains deeply committed to the open-source community, serving on the OpenSearch Project Leadership Committee and as a maintainer for Jaeger, the CNCF-graduated distributed tracing project.