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

Propagating context

Getting the information from one service to another across the network boundary requires some additional work, namely, propagating the context. Without this context propagation, each service will generate a new trace independently, which means that the backend will not be able to tie the services together at analysis time. As shown in Figure 4.5, a trace without propagation between services is missing the link between services, which means the traces will be more difficult to correlate:

Figure 4.5 – Traces with and without propagation

Specifically, the data needed to propagate the context between services is span_context. This includes four key pieces of information:

  • span_id: The identifier of the current span
  • trace_id: The identifier of the current trace
  • trace_flags: The additional configuration flags available to control tracing levels and sampling, as per the W3C Trace Context specification (https://www.w3.org/TR...