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

Recording events, exceptions, and status

Quickly identifying when an issue arises is a key aspect of distributed tracing. As demonstrated in Figure 4.7 with the Jaeger interface, in many backends, traces that contain errors are highlighted to make them easy to find for users of data:

Figure 4.7 – The trace view in Jaeger

In the following sections, we will explore the facilities that OpenTelemetry provides to capture events, record exceptions, and set the status of a span.

Events

In addition to attributes, an event provides the facility to record data about a span that occurs at a specific time. Events are similar to logs in OpenTracing in that they contain a timestamp and can contain a list of attributes or key/value pairs. An event is added via an add_event method on the span, which accepts a name argument and, optionally, a timestamp and a list of attributes, as shown in the following code:

shopper.py

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