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

Using OpenTelemetry Collector

Now that we're familiar with the core components of OpenTelemetry Collector and OTLP, it's time to start using the collector with the grocery store. The following diagram gives us an idea of how telemetry data is currently configured and where we are trying to go with this chapter:

Figure 8.7 – Before and after diagrams of exporting telemetry data

At the beginning of this chapter, we installed the OTLP exporters for Python via the opentelemetry-exporter-otlp package. This, in turn, installed the packages that are available for each protocol and encoding:

  • opentelemetry-exporter-otlp-proto-grpc
  • opentelemetry-exporter-otlp-proto-http
  • opentelemetry-exporter-otlp-json-http

The package that includes all the protocols and the encoding is a convenient way to start, but once you're familiar with the requirements for your environment, you'll want to choose a specific encoding and protocol...