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 cover a few different tools that we can use to deploy the collector. We will be using containers to run the sample application and collector; all the examples are available from the public Docker container registry (https://hub.docker.com). Although we won't dive too deeply into what containers are, just know that containers provide a convenient way to build, package, and deploy self-contained applications that are immutable. For us to run containers locally, we will use Docker, just as we did in Chapter 2, OpenTelemetry Signals - Traces, Metrics and Logs. The following is a list of the technical requirements for this chapter:

  • If you don't already have Docker installed on your machine, follow the instructions available at https://docs.docker.com/get-docker/ to get started on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Once you have it installed, run the following command from a Terminal. If everything is working correctly, there should be no...