Book Image

Cloud-Native Observability with OpenTelemetry

By : Alex Boten
Book Image

Cloud-Native Observability with OpenTelemetry

By: Alex Boten

Overview of this book

Cloud-Native Observability with OpenTelemetry is a guide to helping you look for answers to questions about your applications. This book teaches you how to produce telemetry from your applications using an open standard to retain control of data. OpenTelemetry provides the tools necessary for you to gain visibility into the performance of your services. It allows you to instrument your application code through vendor-neutral APIs, libraries and tools. By reading Cloud-Native Observability with OpenTelemetry, you’ll learn about the concepts and signals of OpenTelemetry - traces, metrics, and logs. You’ll practice producing telemetry for these signals by configuring and instrumenting a distributed cloud-native application using the OpenTelemetry API. The book also guides you through deploying the collector, as well as telemetry backends necessary to help you understand what to do with the data once it's emitted. You’ll look at various examples of how to identify application performance issues through telemetry. By analyzing telemetry, you’ll also be able to better understand how an observable application can improve the software development life cycle. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-versed with OpenTelemetry, be able to instrument services using the OpenTelemetry API to produce distributed traces, metrics and logs, and more.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Basics
3
Chapter 2: OpenTelemetry Signals – Traces, Metrics, and Logs
5
Section 2: Instrumenting an Application
10
Section 3: Using Telemetry Data

Understanding the components of OpenTelemetry Collector

The collector allows users to configure pipelines for each signal separately by combining any number of receivers, processors, and exporters as shown in the following diagram. This gives the collector a lot of flexibility in how and where it can be used:

Figure 8.2 – Dataflow through the collector

The initial implementation of the collector was a fork of the OpenCensus Service (https://opencensus.io/service/), which served a similar purpose in the OpenCensus ecosystem. The collector supports many open protocols out of the box for inputs and outputs, which we'll explore in more detail as we take a closer look at each component. Each component in the collector implements the Component interface, which is fairly minimal, as shown in the following code:

type Component interface {
    Start(ctx context.Context, host Host) error
    Shutdown(ctx context...