Speaker
Abstract
Queues are the backbone of scalable, asynchronous systems, but they can easily create a tangled web of complexity. When things slow down, the bottleneck could be anywhere, from producer lag to consumer exhaustion, and standard metrics often fail to show the full picture.
In this session, we’ll explore how Gearset uses OpenTelemetry to bring visibility to our asynchronous workflows. We’ll share the lessons learned at Gearset while scaling our message-driven systems, and dive into:
- Connecting the dots: Why distributed tracing is non-negotiable for event-driven systems.
- Implementation: Using OTel standards to bridge the gap between producers and consumers.
- The hard parts: Tackling long-running traces, measuring true end-to-end duration, and creating lasting cultural change
- Outcomes: How we shifted from "drowning in dashboards" to precise, trace-driven debugging, with real world examples
Topics
Observability
queues
architecture
Platform Engineering
76%
senior dev or higher
1:11
speaker ratio
60+
practitioners
QCon London 2026 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.
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