Welcome to the expert level of the Echoes Lost in Orbit challenge adventure! Your mission: fix a broken observability pipeline for an interstellar ride-sharing service. This is a hands-on troubleshooting exercise using Kubernetes, Argo Rollouts, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and Jaeger.
The entire infrastructure is pre-provisioned in your Codespace — Kubernetes cluster, Argo CD, Argo Rollouts, OpenTelemetry Collector, Prometheus, Jaeger, and the HotROD application are ready to go. You don’t need to set up anything locally. Just focus on solving the problem.
The Challenge
After fixing the Zephyrian communications, word of your progressive release mastery spread across the galaxy. The Bytari 
, a highly advanced species from the Andromeda sector, were impressed. They want to apply progressive delivery to their mission-critical service: HotROD (Hyperspace Operations & Transport - Rapid Orbital Dispatch), an interstellar ride-sharing service handling dispatch requests across thousands of star systems.
Here’s the catch: a previous engineer started instrumenting HotROD with OpenTelemetry and configured Argo Rollouts for automated validation, but left the setup incomplete. The observability pipeline is broken, preventing safe deployments.
The Bytari don’t use staging/production environments. They believe in single-environment progressive delivery validated purely by trace-derived metrics and automated health checks. Your mission: fix the observability pipeline and canary validation to make HotROD deployment-ready.
What you’ll learn:
- Configure OpenTelemetry Collector pipelines (receivers, connectors, exporters)
- Use the Span Metrics Connector to convert traces into metrics
- Prevent “idle canaries” that deploy successfully but were never really tested because they received no traffic
- Integrate distributed tracing for automated rollout decisions
- Write PromQL queries based on app and trace-derived metrics
Objective:
By the end of this level, you should have:
- Automated rollout progression to HotROD version
1.76.0driven by observability signals - OpenTelemetry Collector configured with:
- OTLP receiver for traces from HotROD
- Spanmetrics connector converting traces as metrics
- Trace export to Jaeger, metrics export to Prometheus
- Canary analysis validating deployments with 3 queries:
- Traffic detection ensuring minimum request rate (>= 0.05 req/s) to the canary to prevent “idle canaries” that get promoted but never had real traffic. You can use the
hotrod_requests_totalmetric to verify this - Error rate thresholds (< 5%)
- Latency thresholds for the 95th percentile (< 1000ms)
- Traffic detection ensuring minimum request rate (>= 0.05 req/s) to the canary to prevent “idle canaries” that get promoted but never had real traffic. You can use the
The Bytari engineer who started this setup left an architecture diagram that should help you getting started:
Deadline: Wednesday, 14 January 2026 at 09:00 CET
You can still complete the challenge after this date, but points will only be awarded for submissions before the deadline.
Level: 
Expert
Quickstart
- Fork the Open Ecosystem Challenges repo
- Launch a Codespace with the Adventure 01 | Expert (Hyperspace Operations & Transport) configuration
- Fix the configuration issues in
adventures/01-echoes-lost-in-orbit/expert/manifeststo meet the challenge objectives
Check out the full story & walkthrough guide for detailed instructions.
Verification & Submission
-
Run the smoke test in your Codespace:
adventures/01-echoes-lost-in-orbit/expert/smoke-test.sh -
If it succeeds, commit and push your changes to your fork
-
Trigger the verification workflow on GitHub Actions (Actions tab → Verify Adventure → Run workflow)
-
Submit your solution by replying to this topic with:
- The URL of your fork
- A screenshot of your successful workflow run (showing , workflow name, and username)
Community Guidelines
Keep solutions vendor-agnostic; no promotional content
This is a public forum; don’t post secrets or internal data
Be respectful and constructive (see our Code of Conduct)
Need Help?
- Start a discussion
- Report an issue if something is broken
Ready to bring the Zephyrians online? Good luck, and we can’t wait to see your solutions!
