About the Guru

Hi, I'm Vaishak. I've spent nearly two decades in IT Infrastructure, SRE, and automation, but my deepest obsession lately has been OpenTelemetry.

When I first encountered OTel a few years ago, it was a promising but chaotic project. Documentation was sparse, APIs were breaking, and "production readiness" was a generous term. Today, it's the industry standard, with over 20,000 contributors and massive enterprise adoption.

Why "Guru"?

In the original Sanskrit sense, a guru is not a master on a pedestal, but a remover of darkness (gu = darkness, ru = remover). It's someone who shines a light on the path so others don't stumble.

That is the mission of this site. OpenTelemetry is complex. The "darkness" of distributed systems—where requests vanish into microservice black holes—is real. My goal is to share the light I've found through years of trial, error, and scaling.

From Lab to Production

Most tutorials stop at docker-compose up. That's the "Lab."
This blog is about the "Production":

• What happens when you ingest 100k spans/second?
• How do you convince 500 developers to instrument their code?
• How do you manage sampling so your bill doesn't bankrupt the company?
• What actually breaks at scale?

If you're an SRE, a DevOps engineer, or just someone tired of debugging in the dark, welcome. Let's learn together.