FOSDEM 2026 - How to instrument Go without changing a single line of code

Описание: Zero-touch observability for Go is finally becoming real. In this talk, we’ll walk through the different strategies you can use to instrument Go applications without changing a single line of code, and what they cost you in terms of overhead, stability, and security.
We’ll compare several concrete approaches and projects:
eBPF-based auto-instrumentation, using OpenTelemetry’s Go auto-instrumentation agent:
https://github.com/open-telemetry/ope...
https://opentelemetry.io/docs/zero-co...
https://opentelemetry.io/docs/zero-co...
Compile-time manipulation, using tools that rewrite or augment Go binaries at build time, such as:
https://github.com/open-telemetry/ope...
https://github.com/Datadog/orchestrion
Beyond what exists today, we’ll look at how ongoing work in the Go runtime and diagnostics ecosystem could unlock cleaner, safer hooks for future auto-instrumentation, including:
Further Runtime techniques, like shared-library injection, and binary trampolines, as used in OpenTelemetry, such as:
LD_PRELOAD magic
https://github.com/open-telemetry/ope...
https://github.com/open-telemetry/ope...
USDT (User Statically-Defined Tracing) probes, exploring how to add or generate USDT probe points for Go services (at build time or via injection) so that external tooling (eBPF, DTrace-style tools, etc.) can consume high-level events without source changes.
Adding further “tracepoints” to recently added tracing facilities to the runtime:
runtime/trace and diagnostics primitives:
https://pkg.go.dev/runtime/trace
https://go.dev/doc/diagnostics
Proposals such as Go “flight recording” (Issue #63185):
https://github.com/golang/go/issues/6...
Throughout the talk, we’ll use benchmark results and small, realistic services to compare these strategies along three axes:
Performance overhead (latency, allocations, CPU impact)
Robustness and upgradeability across Go versions and container images
Operational friction: rollout complexity, debugging, and failure modes
Attendees will leave with a clear mental model of when to choose eBPF, compile-time rewriting, runtime injection, or USDT-based approaches, how OpenTelemetry’s Go auto-instrumentation fits into that picture, and where upcoming runtime features might take us next. The focus is strongly practical and open-source: everything shown will be reproducible using publicly available tooling in the Go and OpenTelemetry ecosystems.