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

Automatic configuration

We added new instrumentation in the past three chapters and watched how we could generate more information each time we instrumented the code. We will now see how we can continue to provide the same level of telemetry but simplify our lives by removing some of the code. The first code we will be removing is the configuration code we extracted into the common.py module. If you recall from previous chapters, the purpose of the configure_tracer, configure_meter, and configure_logger methods, which we will review in detail shortly, is to do the following:

  • Configure the emitter of telemetry.
  • Configure the destination and mechanism to output the telemetry.
  • Add resource information to identify our service.

As we saw earlier in this chapter, the opentelemetry-instrument script enables us to remove the code doing the configuration by interpreting environment variables or command-line arguments that will do the same thing. We will review the configuration...