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

Technical requirements

All the code for the examples in the chapter is available in the companion repository, which can be downloaded using git with the following command. The examples are under the chapter12 directory:

$ git clone https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Cloud-Native-Observability
$ cd Cloud-Native-Observability/chapter12

The first example in the chapter consists of an example application that uses the OpenTelemetry Python SDK to configure a sampler. To run the code, we'll need Python 3.6 or greater installed:

$ python --version
Python 3.8.9
$ python3 --version
Python 3.8.9

If Python is not installed on your system, or the installed version of Python is less than the supported version, follow the instructions from the Python website (https://www.python.org/downloads/) to install a compatible version.

Next, install the following OpenTelemetry packages via pip. Note that through dependency requirements, additional packages will automatically be installed...