Last updated: March 20, 2026
Code RED Newsletter #27
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe is right around the corner, and the cloud-native world is about to descend on Amsterdam for a week of YAML, hallway-track wisdom, and more observability debates than anyone can reasonably handle.
If you’re attending, come say hi to the Dash0 team at booth #760. We’ll be running demos, talking OpenTelemetry pipelines, and yes - handing out the hottest swag at KubeCon (including our signature backpacks).
This issue is a bit of a KubeCon special. We’re highlighting the talks, events, and a few recent pieces of work we’re excited about heading into the conference.
In focus: Dash0 at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon
KubeCon week is always packed, and this year Dash0 is showing up across multiple events - from Observability Day to ArgoCon, Kubernetes on Edge Day to the main event. Catch us at one of the following sessions:
Making Observability Work at the Edge
Julia Furst Morgado (Dash0) & Graziano Casto (Akamas) - Kubernetes on Edge Day
Observability looks very different when Kubernetes runs at the edge. Bandwidth is limited, connectivity is unreliable, and shipping every trace upstream simply isn’t practical. This session introduces an OpenTelemetry micro-collector strategy for constrained environments, using techniques like tail-based sampling and batching directly at the edge. The goal: send high-value telemetry upstream without overwhelming networks or devices.
Add the session to your schedule
Panel: From Signals to Safety Nets - Self-Healing Progressive Delivery with Argo Rollouts
Julia Furst Morgado (Dash0), Anastasiia Gubska (Chase UK), Joe Fuller (Buoyant) - ArgoCon
Progressive delivery is moving beyond static canaries and manual analysis toward telemetry-driven automation. In this panel, we explore how observability signals from Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and service meshes can drive self-healing deployments - pausing rollouts when latency spikes, scaling services when error rates rise, or rolling back changes automatically. A glimpse into a future where deployment pipelines act as control planes for resilience.
Add the session to your schedule
Observability at the Edge: The State of OpenTelemetry in Kubernetes Ingress Controllers
Kasper Borg Nissen (Dash0) - Observability Day
Ingress controllers are the front door of Kubernetes, yet they often remain one of the least instrumented parts of the stack. Every request passes through ingress first - meaning missing edge telemetry leads to incomplete traces and blind spots. This talk explores the current state of OpenTelemetry support across popular ingress controllers, highlighting what works today and where gaps still exist.
Add the session to your schedule
Taming Complexity: Building Observable Workflows with Dapr and OpenTelemetry
Mauricio “Salaboy” Salatino (Diagrid) & Kasper Borg Nissen (Dash0) - KubeCon+CloudNativeCon
Modern cloud-native systems increasingly rely on event-driven workflows and asynchronous services - which makes them harder to observe. In this session, Mauricio and I explore how Dapr Workflows and OpenTelemetry can help make these systems visible. Using the OpenTelemetry Operator and Dapr’s built-in observability, we show how traces, metrics, and logs can flow across services and workflows - even across asynchronous boundaries.
Add the session to your schedule
The theory and practice of sampling in OpenTelemetry
Michele Mancioppi (Dash0)
Distributed tracing is powerful - and expensive. Even modest systems can generate millions of spans per minute, making it hard to store and even harder to query meaningfully. Sampling is the answer, but choosing the right approach comes with real trade-offs. This session explores head vs. tail sampling, probabilistic vs. rate-limited strategies, and what happens when you scale tail sampling in practice.
Expect a practical framework for balancing cost, completeness, and metric accuracy - without breaking your pipelines.
Dash0 Events at KubeCon
We’re also hosting a few community events during the week.
Hotservability during KubeCrawl
Watch observability leaders face the heat as the sauces get progressively hotter. Then grab a bite yourself and see how long you last - all while talking observability, AI, and everything in between.
Check out the event during KubeCrawl
Heineken Happy Hour
Kick off KubeCon in true Amsterdam style. Join Edera, Antithesis, Dash0, groundcover, Minimus, and The New Stack at the iconic Heineken Brewery for drinks, conversations, and a proper start to the week. Proost to tulips, taps, and cloud native.
OTel Oasis
Just 4 minutes from the KubeCon floor, the OTel Oasis is a calmer space for real conversations. No booth noise, no sales pitches - just OpenTelemetry, good coffee, and a chance to actually hear each other think.
Check out the schedule at the OTel Oasis
If you want to talk OpenTelemetry, agentic AI, or the future of observability - these are great places to do it without PowerPoint slides.
Dash0 Semantic Conventions Are Now Public
Collecting telemetry is easy. Making it consistent and understandable across systems is where things get interesting.
We’ve made the Dash0 Semantic Conventions registry public, documenting the telemetry, attributes, and events used across the platform - and how they map to OpenTelemetry. Behind the scenes it’s powered by OpenTelemetry Weaver, the tooling designed to define and validate telemetry schemas in a structured way. Think of Weaver as the loom that keeps your telemetry from turning into a tangled pile of attributes.
Code RED Podcast: Beyond On-Call: How incident.io Built Multiplayer Incident Response with Stephen Whitworth
Incident response used to be a fairly lonely experience: an alert fires, someone gets paged, and debugging begins.
Stephen Whitworth from incident.io joins Mirko Novakovic to talk about how modern incident management is becoming a collaborative system instead. They explore the evolution from simple alerting to structured incident workflows, shared context during outages, and how teams can turn chaotic firefighting into coordinated response.
If you’ve ever been on call during a messy outage, this episode will probably feel familiar.
Teach your AI coding agent OpenTelemetry best practices
AI coding agents are starting to write infrastructure and instrumentation code - which is both exciting and slightly terrifying.
To help keep telemetry sane, we published a set of OpenTelemetry “skills” for AI agents. These rules teach agents how to choose the right signal, configure resource attributes correctly, design collector pipelines, and avoid common mistakes like high-cardinality metrics.
The idea is simple: if AI is going to generate observability code, it should follow the same best practices human engineers would.
Choice cuts
A few extra observability reads while you wait for your next Kubernetes pod restart.
Mastering the OpenTelemetry Transform Processor
The transform processor is one of the most powerful (and occasionally confusing) tools inside the OpenTelemetry Collector.
This guide walks through how to use OpenTelemetry Transformation Language (OTTL) to enrich attributes, redact sensitive data, reshape telemetry, and route signals through your pipelines.
If you’re running real production pipelines, mastering transform is almost mandatory.
When Agentic Identity Becomes Infrastructure
Andrew Mallaband explores a fascinating idea: as AI agents become first-class actors inside systems, identity itself becomes infrastructure.
Instead of simply authenticating users or services, platforms will increasingly need identity models for autonomous agents, decision systems, and automated workflows.
It’s a thoughtful look at what happens when infrastructure starts including software actors that think and act independently.
See You in Amsterdam
KubeCon week is always intense - a mix of deep technical talks, hallway track debates, and the occasional late-night architecture discussion over a drink.
If you’re in Amsterdam, swing by booth #760, join one of our events, or stop me after one of the sessions. I always enjoy hearing how teams are actually running observability in production.
Until then - keep instrumenting, keep correlating signals, and maybe take a moment to appreciate the humble span that started your trace.
We’ll be back in two weeks.
Kasper, out.
Hi, my name is Kasper!
I’m Kasper Borg Nissen, Developer Advocate at Dash0. I’m passionate about Observability and bridging the gap toward developers through Platform Engineering. I’ve previously worked 8 years as a platform engineer, I’m a former co-chair of KubeCon+CloudNativeCon, and I’m genuinely obsessed with all things cloud-native and open standards.
