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

At the time of writing, OpenTelemetry for Python supports Python 3.6+. All Python examples in this book will use Python 3.8, which can be downloaded and installed by following the instructions at https://docs.python.org/3/using/index.html. The following command can verify which version of Python is installed. It's possible for multiple versions to be installed simultaneously on a single system, which is why both python and python3 are shown here:

$ python --version
$ python3 --version

It is recommended to use a virtual environment to run the examples in this book (https://docs.python.org/3/library/venv.html). A virtual environment in Python allows you to install packages in isolation from the rest of the system, meaning that if anything goes wrong, you can always delete the virtual environment and start a fresh one. The following commands will create a new virtual environment in a folder called cloud_native_observability:

$ mkdir cloud_native_observability...