Bringing Distributed Tracing to your iOS apps with OpenTelemetry

Presenter: Rob Amos
Understanding how your users interact with your app is important. Typically this involves pulling in a third party SDK and service and relying on its capabilities and limitations for real user monitoring (RUM), and then your data lies isolated in that third party's SaaS platform. But what if your app is more complex than a JSON pretty printer and has monitoring needs beyond user interactions? What if the third party gets acquired and raises their prices? What if you'd like to be able to see your app monitoring data alongside your backend data to make support easier?
In the last few years the industry has introduced and started prompting OpenTelemetry as an open standard for distributed tracing, metrics and structured logging, and a lot of server-side software is moving to support it, including Apple! In this talk, Rob gives you an introduction to distributed tracing, and walks through adopting the tools that Apple provide for Swift on Server ecosystems and integrates them into a demo iOS app, showing you how to take your user monitoring and telemetry needs into your own hands and a stack you can own, highlighting the support benefits of being able to see the distributed trace from the user interactions all the way through the server stack.
The example project from the session will be available on GitHub afterwards, including the sample Swift-based server.