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

The purpose of OpenTelemetry Collector

In essence, OpenTelemetry Collector is a process that receives telemetry in various formats, processes it, and then exports it to one or more destinations. The collector acts as a broker between the source of the telemetry, applications, or nodes, for example, and the backend that will ultimately store the data for analysis. The following diagram shows where the collector would be deployed in an environment containing various components:

Figure 8.1 – Architecture diagram of an environment with a collector

Deploying a component such as OpenTelemetry Collector is not free as it requires additional resources to be spent on running, operating, and monitoring it. The following are some reasons why deploying a collector may be helpful:

  • You can decouple the source of the telemetry data from its destination. This means that developers can configure a single destination for the telemetry data in application code...