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

Revisiting the grocery store

It's finally time to use all this new knowledge about auto-instrumentation to clean up the grocery store application. This section will showcase the simplified code that continues to produce the telemetry we've come to expect over the last few chapters. The custom decorators have been removed, as has the code configuring the tracer provider, meter provider, and log emitter provider. All we're left with now is the application code.

Legacy inventory

The legacy inventory service is a great place to start. It is a small Flask application with a single endpoint. The Flask instrumentor, installed at the beginning of the chapter via the opentelemetry-instrumentation-flask package, will replace the manual instrumentation code we previously added. The following code instantiates the Flask app and provides the /inventory endpoint:

legacy_inventory.py

#!/usr/bin/env python3
from flask import Flask, jsonify
app = Flask(__name__)
@app.route...