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

Sampling at the application level via the SDK

Allowing applications to decide what to sample, provides a great amount of flexibility to application developers and operators, as these applications are the source of the tracing data. Samplers can be configured in OpenTelemetry as a property of the tracer provider. In the following code, a configure_tracer method configures the OpenTelemetry tracing pipeline and receives Sampler as a method argument. This method is used to obtain three different tracers, each with its own sampling configuration:

  • ALWAYS_ON: A sampler that always samples.
  • ALWAYS_OFF: A sampler that never samples.
  • TraceIdRatioBased: A probability sampler, which in the example is configured to sample traces 50% of the time.

The code then produces a separate trace using each tracer to demonstrate how sampling impacts the output generated by ConsoleSpanExporter:

sample.py

from opentelemetry.sdk.trace import TracerProvider
from opentelemetry.sdk...