Open Source in Finance Forum New York 2024

Observability is a crucial component of modern, cloud-native software delivery. OpenTelemetry, a CNCF project, is revolutionizing the observability space by providing a standard, built-in framework for telemetry data. In this session, you'll learn the fundamentals of OpenTelemetry and how it's being used to understand and monitor financial applications at organizations such as Vanguard.

As financial firms continue to adopt cloud at growing speed, observability has become increasingly critical to help detect and resolve issues and achieve system reliability. Generally, companies with large volumes of pre-existing code look to adopt an industry leading observability platform, which requires minimal effort for adoption, and provides proprietary agents with out-of-the-box instrumentation supporting a wide variety of technologies, infrastructure components, and frameworks. As technology evolves rapidly, observability platforms are challenged to support merging services, applications, and frameworks. During our session, we will discuss how OpenTelemetry (OTel), used in conjunction with other enterprise observability platforms, can complement observability platforms in providing support for newer technologies. Additionally, we will showcase how easy it can be to instrument an application with OTel by leveraging GenAI/ChatGPT, and debunk beliefs that OTel instrumentation requires significant developer overhead.

As applications evolve from monolithic to distributed systems, teams must comprehend the path of each transaction across various systems to assess each system's performance. This is critical in financial systems where transaction speed directly impacts financial outcomes and customer experience. However, a key concern is determining the optimal level of observability for applications. Injecting excessive observability elements into the code can potentially degrade application performance and added risk of sensitive data exposure. How can one decide what to monitor without compromising application performance? This talk explores the challenges of instrumenting high-throughput, high-performance applications without compromising their performance. It also addresses strategies for maximizing system observability to swiftly pinpoint root causes of issues, while managing the risks associated with implementing intricate observability solutions, including potential exposure of sensitive data

Energy consumption has an increasing impact on financial institutions - in terms of cost, environmental footprint, and available capacity. In 2022, the world’s data centers consumed 1% of the world’s total energy, expected to grow to 8% in the following years. As financial institutions try to continuously innovate, they also incur large energy bills. Financial institutions know their total energy footprint, but lack data that enables them to optimize applications, place them in data centers with lower energy cost or environmental impact, or to make tradeoffs between performance and energy consumption. What they lack is application-level power monitoring. Kepler is a CNCF project founded by Red Hat’s emerging technologies group with contributions from IBM Research and Intel. It is an open source project that captures power metrics across a wide range of platforms, focusing on reporting, reduction and regression. In this talk, powered by a live demo, we will introduce Kepler and show how it helps enterprises understand their energy footprint and improve their IT operations, and how community members can contribute to the project, especially for adding new supported platforms.