Life of a Mobile Span - Understanding OpenTelemetry Observability in Mobile Applications

Explore the unique challenges and opportunities of OpenTelemetry observability in mobile environments through this 24-minute conference talk that follows the narrative journey of "Molly," a mobile span living outside traditional data center infrastructure. Discover how runtime factors in mobile applications fundamentally change accepted notions about modeling, semantic conventions, and delivery compared to server-side observability. Learn about the specific ways OpenTelemetry conventions and specifications create both challenges and new possibilities for mobile observability, examining how spans behave differently when recorded on mobile apps versus traditional backend systems. Understand the technical complexities of implementing distributed tracing in mobile environments while gaining insights into the evolving landscape of mobile application monitoring and the unique storytelling potential that mobile spans possess in the broader observability ecosystem.