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

Summary

We've only just scratched the surface of how to run the collector in production by looking at very specific use cases. However, you can start thinking about how to apply the lessons you have learned from this chapter to your environments. Whether it be using Kubernetes, bare metal, or another form of hybrid cloud environment, the same principles we explored in this chapter regarding how to best collect telemetry will apply. Collecting telemetry from an application should always be done with minimal impact on the application itself. The sidecar deployment mode provides a collection point as close as possible to the application without adding any dependency to the application itself.

The deployment of the collector as an agent gives us the ability to collect information about the worker running our applications, which could also allow us to monitor the health of the resources in our cluster. Additionally, this serves as a convenient point to augment the telemetry from...