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

Running in production

Using analysis tools in development is one thing; running them in production is another. Running a single container on one machine is not an acceptable strategy for operating a service that provides information that's critical to an organization. It's worth considering the challenges of scaling telemetry backends to meet the demands of the real world. The following subsections highlight areas that require further reading before you run any of the backends mentioned earlier in production.

High availability

The availability of telemetry backends is likely not as critical to end users as that of the applications they are used to monitor. However, having an outage and realizing that the data that's required to investigate is unavailable or missing during the outage causes problems. If an application promises an uptime of 99.99%, the telemetry backend must be available to account for those guarantees. Some aspects to consider when thinking of the...