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

Technical requirements

This chapter will introduce OpenTelemetry Collector as a standalone binary, which can be downloaded from https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-releases/releases/tag/v0.43.0. It's also possible to build the collector from the source, but this will not be covered in this chapter. The following commands will download the binary that's been compiled for macOS on Intel processors, extract the otelcol file, and ensure the binary can be executed:

$ wget -O otelcol.tar.gz https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-releases/releases/download/v0.43.0/otelcol_0.43.0_darwin_amd64.tar.gz
$ tar -xzf otelcol.tar.gz otelcol
$ chmod +x ./otelcol
$ ./otelcol --version
otelcol version 0.43.0

With the correct binary downloaded, let's ensure that the collector can start by using the following command. It is expected that the process will exit:

$ ./otelcol
Error: failed to get config: invalid configuration: no enabled receivers...