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

Backend options for analyzing telemetry data

The world of observability contains an abundance of tools to provide you with insights into what systems are doing. Within OpenTelemetry, a backend is the destination of the telemetry data and is where it is stored and analyzed. All the telemetry backends that we will explore in this chapter provide the following:

  • A destination for the telemetry data. This is usually in the form of a network endpoint, but not always.
  • Storage for the telemetry data. The retention period that's supported by the storage is determined by the size of the storage and the amount of data being stored.
  • Visualization tooling for the data. All the tools we'll use provide a web interface for displaying and querying telemetry data.

In OpenTelemetry, applications connect to backends via exporters, two of which we've already configured: the console exporter and the OTLP exporter. Each application can be configured to send data directly...