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

Configuring the tracing pipeline

With the packages now installed, we're ready to take our first step to generate distributed traces with OpenTelemetry – configuring the tracing pipeline. The tracing pipeline is what allows the tracing data we explored in Chapter 2, OpenTelemetry Signals – Traces, Metrics, and Logs, to be generated when the OpenTelemetry API calls are made. The pipeline also defines where and how the data will be emitted. Without a tracing pipeline, a no-op implementation is used by the API, meaning the code will not generate distributed traces. The tracing pipeline configures the following:

  • TracerProvider to determine how spans should be generated
  • A Resource object, which identifies the source of the spans
  • SpanProcessor to describe how spans will be exported
  • SpanExporter to describe where the spans will be exported

The following code imports the TracerProvider, ConsoleSpanExporter, and SimpleSpanProcessor classes from the...