Code Red Newsletter #19

Hi there,

KubeCon+CloudNativeCon North America is almost here, and we’re gearing up for Atlanta.Before things kick off, I’ve got a small announcement to share - and it’s one I’m really proud of.

In Focus: OpenTelemetry for Dummies

We’ve just released OpenTelemetry for Dummies, a Dash0 Special Edition published by Wiley. Written by Ayooluwa Isaiah and myself, this book is your practical guide to bringing order to the chaos of fragmented telemetry.

If you’ve ever tried to correlate logs, traces, and metrics across multiple vendors and formats, you know how messy observability can get. This free guide will help you standardize your telemetry and finally make sense of it all.

You’ll learn:

• The core components of OpenTelemetry and how they work together (traces, metrics, and logs)
• Step-by-step setup instructions to start collecting unified telemetry immediately
• How to achieve correlation with context across distributed services
• The real-world business impact of adopting an open, vendor-neutral observability standard

Get your copy here: OpenTelemetry for Dummies (Dash0 Special Edition)

And if you’re joining us at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon North America in Atlanta, come by the Dash0 booth - we’ll have printed copies of the book available. It’s the perfect chance to grab one (and maybe get it signed).

As OpenTelemetry continues to evolve, the community around it is moving just as fast - refining standards, fixing rough edges, and pushing adoption across every corner of the ecosystem. Here are a few of the latest highlights worth reading:

OpenTelemetry Adoption Update: Rust, Prometheus, and Other Speed Bumps

B. Cameron Gain digs into The New Stack’s latest OpenTelemetry adoption report, which shows impressive enterprise momentum but also some clear friction points. Rust and Prometheus integration remain challenging, and many teams are still figuring out how to scale collectors and keep telemetry quality consistent across languages.

Read the full article.

OpenTelemetry Sampling Update

The OpenTelemetry team has released an update on one of the more complex parts of observability: sampling. With the new W3C TraceContext Level 2 spec, sampling decisions can now stay consistent across SDKs and collectors - thanks to probability-based sampling and a new “threshold for rejection” model that keeps trace counts predictable even in multi-stage pipelines.

Read more.

The Declarative Configuration Journey: Why It Took 5 Years to Ignore Health Check Endpoints

In this post the authors trace the long road to declarative configuration in OpenTelemetry - and how it finally gave us a clean way to ignore noisy health checks. It’s a fascinating look at how years of experimentation and iteration led to the new YAML-based configuration model now starting to ship across SDKs and collectors.

Read the blog.

Code RED Podcast: Inside the AI SRE Boom

Anish Agarwal from Traversal joins Mirko Novakovic for a deep dive into the rise of “AI SREs” - systems that don’t just observe, but analyze and act. They explore how Traversal maps service relationships automatically, what it takes to train models on observability data, and how AI is changing the way we think about root-cause analysis.

Listen to the episode.

Choice Cuts

Because even observability needs a few side dishes.

AI-SRE Looks Smart, But It’s Time to Face the Truth About What’s Missing

Andrew Mallaband argues that while AI in observability looks powerful, it often hides a critical flaw: a lack of transparency. Without context or explainability, AI-assisted ops risk becoming another black box - powerful, but untrustworthy. It’s a sharp reminder that the goal isn’t automation for its own sake, but intelligence you can actually reason about.

Read on LinkedIn.

The $18,000 Dashboard Nobody Used: How Observability Theatre Drains Your Budget

In this cautionary tale from PCAS Engineering, an $18,000 dashboard project failed because no one actually used it. It’s a brutally honest reflection on “observability theatre” - the tendency to invest in flashy tools and visuals without fixing the underlying telemetry or data quality. Pretty dashboards are great, but useful ones pay the bills.

Read the post.

See You in Atlanta

If you’re attending KubeCon+CloudNativeCon North America (Nov 10–13), come say hi. You’ll find us at the Dash0 booth (#710) - red overalls, live demos, the famous backpacks, and yes, a stack of printed books.

Oh, and there’s one more thing - something we’ll announce the day before the conference. When we revealed it internally, it struck several Dashers like a Lightning Bolt. It’s by far the nerdiest thing we’ve done yet.

Don’t miss our sessions:

• OpenTelemetry for Platform Engineers: Paving the Road To Self-Service Observability - Kasper Borg Nissen, Dash0
• Instrumentation Score: The Difference Between Telemetry and Good Telemetry - Juraci Paixão Kröhling, OllyGarden & Michele Mancioppi, Dash0
• Sponsored Demo: No-Touch Observability with the OpenTelemetry Operator and Dash0 - Kasper Borg Nissen, Dash0
• Designing for Observability: From Noise To Insight - Andrea Chomiak, Dash0
• Taming Telemetry at Scale: Platform Blueprints for Consistent Observability - Aakansha Priya, Dash0 & Marino Wijay, Kong Inc.

Come by, grab a coffee, and let’s talk observability that actually works.

Kasper, out!