The Art and Craft of No-touch Instrumentation

This talk explores the advanced technique of no-touch instrumentation for cloud native applications, focusing on LD_PRELOAD-based injection methods. Learn how automatic instrumentation can enhance observability in containerized environments without requiring manual intervention or special kernel permissions. Michele Mancioppi from Dash0 explains the inner workings of this approach across various runtimes, demonstrating how it provides advantages over eBPF-based methods, particularly in managed compute environments. Discover how these well-established techniques, used by commercial vendors for over a decade, can benefit the broader OpenTelemetry community and help achieve a high baseline of observability with minimal configuration overhead.