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

Using the OpenTelemetry Collector to sample data

Configuring the application to sample traces is great, but what if we wanted to use tail sampling instead? The OpenTelemetry Collector provides a natural point where sampling can be performed. Today, it supports both tail sampling and probabilistic sampling via processors. As we've already discussed the probabilistic sampling processor in Chapter 8, The OpenTelemetry Collector, we'll focus this section on the tail sampling processor.

Tail sampling processor

In addition to supporting the configuration of sampling via specifying a probabilistic sampling percentage, the tail sampling processor can make sampling decisions based on a variety of characteristics of a trace. It can choose to sample based on one of the following:

  • Overall trace duration
  • Span attributes' values
  • Status code of a span

To accomplish this, the tail sampling processor supports the configuration of policies to sample traces...