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

One of the many jobs of software engineers today includes evaluating the new technology and tools that are available to determine whether these tools would improve their ability to accomplish their goals. Leveraging auto-instrumentation, in-code configuration, and the OpenTelemetry Collector, we quickly sent data from one backend to another to help us compare these tools.

All the tools we've discussed in this chapter take much more than a few pages to become familiar with. Entire books have been written about running these in production, and the skills to do so well at scale require practice and experience. Understanding some areas that need additional thinking when those tools are deployed allows us to uncover some of the unknowns.

Looking through the different tools and starting to see how each one provides functionality to visualize the data gave us a sense of how telemetry data can be used to start answering questions about our systems. In the next chapter, we...