Observability Summit North America 2026

Java is one of the most widely used languages for enterprise applications. Frameworks such as Spring Boot and Quarkus make observability straightforward when the OpenTelemetry Java agent can be injected.

In many production environments, however, modifying application code or JVM startup parameters is not possible. In these cases, eBPF-based instrumentation enables observability without code changes, but applying eBPF to Java is challenging. JVM abstraction layers, differences across JDK versions, and the diversity of frameworks and libraries complicate generic instrumentation. The problem becomes even harder when applications rely on TLS-encrypted communication such as HTTPS, gRPC, databases, and messaging systems, where payloads are opaque.

This talk explains how the OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation (OBI) project addresses these challenges, covering key design decisions, trade-offs, and current limitations. The discussion is grounded in real-world examples, including Spring Boot services using HTTPS and gRPC, and a Quarkus application with TLS-encrypted PostgreSQL and Kafka, showing what is possible today with agentless Java observability using eBPF.