QCon London 2026: Uncorking Queueing Bottlenecks with OpenTelemetry

At QCon London 2026, Julian Wreford and Oli Lane from Gearset showcased how distributed tracing and SLOs solve asynchronous observability gaps. By shifting from queue-size metrics to latency-based alerts, the team improved incident response. Key technical takeaways included using OpenTelemetry trace state for async duration tracking and wide events to uncover hidden architectural waste. By Mark Silvester