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

Auto-instrumentation configuration

Since auto-instrumentation aims to get started as quickly as possible, let's see how fast we can generate telemetry with as little code as possible. The following code makes a web request to https://www.cloudnativeobservability.com and prints the HTTP response code:

http_request.py

import requests
url = "https://www.cloudnativeobservability.com"
resp = requests.get(url)
print(resp.status_code)

When running the code, assuming network connectivity is available and the URL we're requesting connects us to a server that is operating normally, we should see 200 printed out:

$ python http_request.py
200

Great, the program works; now it's time to instrument it. The following command uses the opentelemetry-instrument application to wrap the application we created. We will look more closely at the command and its options shortly. For now, run the command:

$ opentelemetry-instrument --traces_exporter console \
 ...