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

Chapter 5: Metrics – Recording Measurements

Tracing code execution throughout a system is one way to capture information about what is happening in an application, but what if we're looking to measure something that would be better served by a more lightweight option than a trace? Now that we've learned how to generate distributed traces using OpenTelemetry, it's time to look at the next signal: metrics. As we did in Chapter 4, Distributed Tracing – Tracing Code Execution, we will first look at configuring the OpenTelemetry pipeline to produce metrics. Then, we'll continue to improve the telemetry emitted by the grocery store application by using the instruments OpenTelemetry puts at our disposal. In this chapter, we will do the following:

  • Configure OpenTelemetry to collect, aggregate, and export metrics to the terminal.
  • Generate metrics using the different instruments available.
  • Use metrics to gain a better understanding of the grocery...