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

Collecting application telemetry

Previously, we looked at how to use the collector running as a local binary. This can be useful for development and testing, but it's not how the collector would be deployed in a production environment. Before going further, here are some Kubernetes concepts that we will be using in this chapter:

  • Pod: This is a container or a group of containers that form an application.
  • Sidecar: This is a container that is deployed alongside application containers but isn't tightly coupled with the application in the pod.
  • Node: This is a representation of a Kubernetes worker; it could be a physical host or a virtual machine.
  • DaemonSet: This is a pod template specification to ensure a pod is deployed to the configured nodes.

    Important Note

    The concepts of Kubernetes form a much deeper topic than we have time for in this book. For our examples, we will only cover the bare minimum that is necessary for this chapter. There is a lot more to cover...