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 4: Distributed Tracing – Tracing Code Execution

So, now that we have an understanding of the concepts of OpenTelemetry and are familiar with the different signals it covers, it's time to start instrumenting application code. In Chapter 2, OpenTelemetry Signals – Tracing, Metrics, and Logging, we covered the terminology and concepts of those signals by looking at a system that was instrumented with OpenTelemetry. Now, it's time to get hands-on with some code to start generating telemetry ourselves, and to do this, we're going to first look at implementing a tracing signal.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Configuring OpenTelemetry
  • Generating tracing data
  • Enriching the data with attributes, events, and links
  • Adding error handling information

By the end of this chapter, you'll have instrumented several applications with OpenTelemetry and be able to trace how those applications are connected via...