From Group Science Project To Enterprise Service: Rethinking Opentelemetry

Ari Zilka says he counted 23 different observability vendors astatine KubeCon + CloudNativeCon  North America 2025, and talked pinch each azygous one. According to Zilka, first-ever Hortonworks CPO and now laminitis of MyDecisive.ai, they’re each showing customers fundamentally nan aforesaid thing.

“Every observability vendor present astatine KubeCon is showing you a dashboard that has a magical reddish portion of matter connected it, for illustration that’s nan surgery thing,” Zilka told The New Stack. “Only, isolated from successful very contrived usage cases, it’s not really nan surgery thing.”

In this section of The New Stack Makers, self-described “data halfway and large information guy” Zilka sat down pinch TNS Founder and Publisher Alex Williams to talk why observability needs to move from reactive dashboards to proactive operations, and why OpenTelemetry (OTel) take has go unsustainably costly for astir organizations.

The MTTR Problem Nobody Was Solving

Zilka’s vexation comes from nonstop experience. During his clip astatine New Relic, he said pinch astir 2,000 CIOs who each asked for nan aforesaid thing: trim mean clip to solution (MTTR) for strategy errors while besides cutting costs. The only honorable reply he could give, he said, was that specified a solution simply did not exist.

“By nan clip you’re broken, it’s excessively late,” Zilka said. “What you want to do is make judge that nan humans aren’t successful nan loop making nan changes, and that you make each accumulation alteration staring astatine your telemetry while you make nan change. Who amended to look astatine telemetry and make a alteration than an AI?”

MyDecisive.ai is Zilka’s reply to this challenge. Built connected OpenTelemetry, Kubernetes, Prometheus and different cloud autochthonal technologies, nan strategy acts arsenic what Zilka calls “a bump successful nan wire” to intercept telemetry information and usage that to automate decisions for illustration rolling backmost a bad merchandise erstwhile correction rates spike.

When OpenTelemetry Becomes a Team Sport

The impetus for creating MyDecisive, Zilka told nan Makers audience, was what he observed happening pinch Otel take itself. He shared nan communicative of a awesome streaming media institution that went from utilizing Platform arsenic a Service (PaaS) pinch New Relic and Datadog for observability to moving 10,000 OTel instances in-house, pinch 40 group dedicated to maintaining their stack.

“Everywhere I spell that has OpenTelemetry, you person 20- aliases 30-person teams,” Zilka observed. “If it’s a $100 cardinal company, it’s besides sewage astatine slightest 2 aliases 3 dedicated OTel experts.”

Platform engineering teams emotion OTel, he continued, because they yet person package they tin programme and own. But this besides leaves them “locked limb successful limb pinch Dev to get it right.” MyDecisive’s attack decouples that narration truthful level teams tin make autonomous decisions pinch zero request to inquire developers to make corresponding changes successful nan exertion layer.

“We’ve moved from OpenTelemetry arsenic a group subject task to OpenTelemetry arsenic an enterprise-hardened service,” Zilka said.

Watch nan afloat speech to perceive much astir really MyDecisive.ai’s “if this, past that” interface works, why Zilka chose an unfastened root model, and what proactive operations mean for nan early of observability.

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