KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025

If folks think that this will be yet another hand wavy AI talk, prepared to be disappointed! Over the last few quarters, the Observability platform team at eBay has embarked on the journey of building "Explainers" for telemetry signals. "So, you are just shoving data into an LLM, big deal!" - one might say. The approach that we took was slightly different. Yes, an LLM does know how to interpret an OTEL trace waterfall but does it do it predictably? No! For various reasons. This is where AI and Engineering have a beautiful marriage. For each signal, we have carefully married crafty algorithms and LLMs to create more predictable and accurate AI enabled experiences. Some of which include explaining traces, metrics and logs.

We have also cumulated these building block explainers to create compound explainers that can explain dashboards. This talk describes how things like critical path detection along with LLMs are better than just giving entire traces to the LLMs and more.