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

Transporting telemetry via OTLP

We've mentioned OTLP multiple times in this chapter and this book, so let's look at what it is. To ensure that telemetry data is transmitted as efficiently and reliably as possible, OpenTelemetry has defined OTLP. The protocol itself is defined via protocol buffer (https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers) definition files. This means that any client or server that's interested in sending or receiving OTLP only has to implement these definitions to support it. OTLP is the recommended protocol of OpenTelemetry for transmitting telemetry data and is supported as a core component of the collector.

Important Note

Protocol buffers or protobufs are a language and platform-agnostic mechanism for serializing data that was originally intended for gRPC. Libraries are provided to generate the code from the protobuf definition files in a variety of languages. This is a much deeper topic than we will have time for in this book, so if you...