I’m very lucky to have the opportunity to work with Liudmila Molkova, who just joined as a Staff Developer Advocate at Grafana Labs. We decided we would start a new monthly livestream called the Grafana ❤️‍🔥 OpenTelemetry Community Call. In this inaugural episode, we interviewed Marylia Gutierrez about declarative configuration for OpenTelemetry SDKs. We talked about:

• Pains in getting started with OpenTelemetry, particularly around instrumentation and configuration
• What declarative configuration is, and how it improves the experience
• Which languages declarative configuration is for
• The future of declarative configuration in OpenTelemetry
• Marylia’s candidacy for Governing Committee of OTel (vote for her here from October 27th-30th, 2025)