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

Bytecode manipulation

The Java implementation of auto-instrumentation for OpenTelemetry leverages the Java Instrumentation API to instrument code (https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/lang/instrument/Instrumentation.html). This API is defined as part of the Java language and can be used by anyone interested in collecting information about an application.

OpenTelemetry Java agent

The OpenTelemetry Java agent is distributed to users via a single Java archive (JAR) file, which can be downloaded from the opentelemetry-java-instrumentation repository (https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-java-instrumentation/releases). The JAR contains the following components:

  • The javaagent module. This is called by the Java Instrumentation API.
  • Instrumenting libraries for various frameworks and third-party libraries.
  • The tooling to initialize and configure the OpenTelemetry components. These will be used to produce telemetry and deliver it to its destination...