Last updated: October 17, 2025
Code Red Newsletter #18
Hi there,
It’s been a packed few weeks in observability land. Conferences, new releases, and endless hallway conversations have shown just how fast the ecosystem keeps moving. From the developer-heavy halls of GOTO Copenhagen to the buzzing energy of Cloud Native Denmark, the community pulse has never felt stronger.
In Focus: The Pulse of the Community
Observability has always been about more than metrics - it’s about people, platforms, and the stories that connect them.
Over the past weeks, I’ve personally felt that connection full on. In Aarhus, we gathered more than 400 cloud-native enthusiasts for Cloud Native Denmark and turned community energy into real-world impact by donating 250,000 DKK (€33,500) to Coding Pirates to inspire the next generation of IT professionals. Meanwhile, my colleagues from Dash0 joined events like SREcon and AWS Community Day DACH, keeping the conversation going across Europe.
And everywhere - from keynote stages to coffee-line debates - one topic kept surfacing: AI.
At GOTO Copenhagen, developers dove into AI coding assistants and practical tooling. At Dash0, we’re equally excited about what’s next. As hinted in our Series A announcement, something very cool is on the way in the AI space. Stay tuned.
Until then, if you’re curious about how AI can already make your day-to-day smoother, try the Dash0 MCP integrations - I’ve been using it to validate queries in Perses dashboards locally using Claude Code, and it’s quickly become one of those small but mighty workflow upgrades that make observability feel a little smarter.
A few Dash0 announcements
The Dash0 Operator now supports auto-instrumentation for .NET workloads, bringing full traces, metrics, and logs automatically without SDK setup.
We’ve also added support for Exponential Histograms, enabling high-resolution, dynamically scaled metrics straight from OpenTelemetry data.
Access Control is now complete - you can share dashboards, views, check rules, and synthetic checks with your team under one unified model.
And to round things out, Log Tables in Dashboards let you view and filter logs right alongside metrics and traces, completing the three-signal experience.
You can find all these updates on the Dash0 changelog.
Demystifying Automatic Instrumentation: How the Magic Actually Works
Automatic instrumentation often feels like a magic trick - spans appear, metrics flow, and context just… propagates. In this post, Severin Neumann from Causely breaks down how that magic actually works, from bytecode weaving and dynamic linking to the runtime hooks that make OpenTelemetry agents tick. He also highlights what to watch for when things go sideways - like missing spans or broken context chains. A great read for anyone who wants to understand the “how” behind the automation.
How OpenTelemetry Works: Tracing, Metrics and Logs on Kubernetes
In this piece, Mauricio Salatino from Diagrid explores how OpenTelemetry brings order to distributed systems chaos - tying together traces, metrics, and logs across Kubernetes workloads. He explains why adopting OTel from day one isn’t just nice to have but essential for reliable identity, debugging, and preventing production issues before they spread.
Exploring OpenTelemetry Priorities for Mainframes - Insights from Survey Responses
Ruediger Schulze from IBM shares insights from an OpenTelemetry community survey exploring how observability can extend into mainframe environments. The findings reveal both excitement and unique challenges - from language runtime instrumentation to bridging decades-old systems with modern telemetry pipelines. It’s a fascinating glimpse at how open standards are connecting the oldest parts of IT with the newest.
OTel Me… About new(-ish) projects that support OTel
In this LinkedIn round-up, Reese Lee - OpenTelemetry End User SIG maintainer - highlights a wave of emerging projects embracing OpenTelemetry from the start. Keep an eye out for upcoming posts from Reese covering how new projects are adding native OpenTelemetry support and extending the ecosystem even further.
Choice Cuts
A quick cool-down before your next deploy - here’s what’s buzzing across OpenTelemetry.
OpenTelemetry Community Awards 2025
Nominations are open. Celebrate the humans behind the code - contributors, maintainers, and the people answering Slack questions at 2 a.m. Winners will be announced at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025.
Join OpenTelemetry at KubeCon NA 2025
If you’re heading to Atlanta, this roundup has every OTel session, Maintainer Day, and community meet-up worth bookmarking, except my talk at the Platform Engineering Day: “OpenTelemetry for Platform Engineers: Paving the Road to Self-Service Observability”.
Final Thoughts
That wraps up this issue of the Code RED Newsletter - and I’m still buzzing from the conversations over the past few weeks. From engineers trading incident stories, to others asking why OpenTelemetry has become so popular, to teams exploring how to add organizational context to their telemetry (hint: OpenTelemetry Weaver).
The takeaway is clear: observability keeps evolving, but its real strength comes from the people driving it forward - one signal, one conversation, one shared standard at a time.
See you in two weeks. Until then, keep watching the signals, keep sharing your stories, and keep that community pulse strong.
Kasper, out.
