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

What is auto-instrumentation?

In the very early days of the OpenTelemetry project, a proposal was created to support producing telemetry without manual instrumentation. As we mentioned earlier in this book, OpenTelemetry uses OpenTelemetry Enhancement Proposals or OTEPs to propose significant changes or new work before producing a specification. One of the very first OTEPs to be produced by the project (https://github.com/open-telemetry/oteps/blob/main/text/0001-telemetry-without-manual-instrumentation.md) described the need to support users that wanted to produce telemetry without having to modify the code to do so:

Cross-language requirements for automated approaches to extracting portable telemetry data with zero source code modification. – OpenTelemetry Enhancement Proposal #0001

Being able to get started with OpenTelemetry with very little effort for new users was very much a goal from the start of the project. The hope was to address one of the pain points of producing...