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

Chapter 9: Deploying the Collector

Now that we've learned about the ins and outs of the collector, it's time to look at how we can use it in production. This chapter will explain how the flexibility of the collector can help us to deploy it in a variety of scenarios. Using Docker, Kubernetes, and Helm, we will learn how to use the OpenTelemetry collector in combination with the grocery store application from earlier chapters. This will give us the necessary knowledge to start using the collector in our cloud-native environment.

In this chapter, we will focus on the following main topics:

  • Using the collector as a sidecar to collect application telemetry
  • Deploying the collector as an agent to collect system-level telemetry
  • Configuring the collector as a gateway

Along the way, we'll look at some strategies for scaling the collector. Additionally, we'll spend some more time with the processors that we looked at in Chapter 8, OpenTelemetry...