Observability & OpenTelemetry in React Native

Jonathan distinguishes observability, the goal of understanding how an app behaves for users, from OpenTelemetry, a standard for collecting that information. He describes three signal types: spans for activity over time, logs for events, and metrics for measurable values such as CPU or memory use. Real user data can reveal issues that local tests miss, including problems tied to devices or network conditions.

Jonathan contrasts controlled backend systems with mobile apps running across millions of devices, varied capabilities, and unreliable connectivity. Mobile teams also need to define concepts such as sessions and user interactions, while tracing activity across screens, network requests, and many libraries. Building this infrastructure in-house means taking on those collection and instrumentation challenges.

Jonathan says Embrace supports OpenTelemetry so teams can combine client-side data with backend telemetry and use other observability tools. Adam sees the protocol as the key to sharing data, but says OpenTelemetry is not yet a widely adopted React Native standard. His experimental library aims to make the APIs easier to adopt and reduce the work needed to configure features such as session tracking.

Jonathan says React Native can draw on Swift, Android, and JavaScript implementations, but those tools have not been brought together around React Native’s needs. Both guests point to opportunities for library authors to add instrumentation hooks, so SDKs can capture events such as navigation changes without every app implementing them from scratch. Shared semantic conventions could help observability products interpret those signals and provide useful views.

Adam identifies a gap between collecting OpenTelemetry data and turning it into useful insights in observability products. Jonathan says shared conventions for events such as network requests help tools interpret data, and that similar conventions are still needed for mobile crashes and navigation. The guests encourage developers to try observability in development as well as production and get involved in the OpenTelemetry community.