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 10: Configuring Backends

So far, what we've been learning about has focused on the tools that are used to generate telemetry data. Although producing telemetry data is an essential aspect of making a system observable, it would be difficult to argue that the data we've generated in the past few chapters has made our system observable. After all, reading hundreds of lines of output in a console is hardly a practical tool for analysis. Data analysis is an essential aspect of observability that we have only briefly discussed thus far. This chapter is all about the tools we can use to analyze our applications' telemetry.

We are going to cover the following topics:

  • Open source telemetry backends to analyze traces, metrics, and logs
  • Considerations for running analysis systems in production

Throughout this chapter, we will visualize the data we've generated and start thinking about using it in real life. There is a large selection of analysis...