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

The application in this chapter simulates the broken telephone game. If you're not familiar with this game, it is played by having one person think of a phrase and whisper it to the second player. The second player listens to the best of their ability and whispers it to the third player; this continues until the last player shares the message they received with the rest of the group.

Each application represents a player, with the first one printing out the message it is sending, then placing the message in a request object that's sent to the next application. The last application in the game will print out the message it receives. The following diagram shows the data flow of requests and responses through the system:

Figure 3.1 – Architectural diagram of the example application

The communication between each service is done via gRPC (https://grpc.io), a remote procedure call system developed by Google. For the sake...