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

Summary

And just like that, you've explored many important concepts of the tracing signal in OpenTelemetry! There was quite a bit to grasp in this chapter, but hopefully, the concepts we've been exploring so far are starting to make more sense now that there's some code behind them. With this knowledge, you now know how to configure different components of the OpenTelemetry tracing pipeline to obtain a tracer and export data to the console. You also have the ability to start spans in various ways, depending on your application's needs. We then spent some time improving the data emitted by enriching it using attributes, resources, and resource detectors. Last but not least, we took a look at the important topic of events, status, and exceptions to capture some important information about errors when they happen in code.

Our understanding of the Context API will allow us to share information across our application, and knowing how to use the Propagation API will...