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

Chapter 3: Auto-Instrumentation

The purpose of telemetry is to give people information about systems. This data is used to make informed decisions about ways to improve software and prevent disasters from occurring. In the case of an outage, analytics tools can help us investigate the root cause of the interruption by interpreting telemetry. Once the event has been resolved, the recorded traces, metrics, and logs can be correlated retroactively to gain a complete picture of what happened. In all these cases, the knowledge that's gained from telemetry assists in solving problems, be it future, present, or past, in applications within an organization. Being able to see the code is very rarely the bread and butter of an organization, which sometimes makes conversations about investing in observability difficult. Decision-makers must constantly make tradeoffs regarding where to invest. The upfront cost of instrumenting code can be a deterrent to even getting started, especially if...