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

As with the examples in the previous chapter, the code is written using Python 3.8, but OpenTelemetry Python supports Python 3.6+ at the time of writing. Ensure you have a compatible version installed on your system following the instructions at https://docs.python.org/3/using/index.html. To verify that a compatible version is installed on your system, run the following commands:

$ python --version
$ python3 --version

On many systems, both python and python3 point to the same installation, but this is not always the case, so it's good to be aware of this if one points to an unsupported version. In all examples, running applications in Python will call the python command, but they can also be run via the python3 command, depending on your system.

The first few examples in this chapter will show a standalone example exploring how to configure OpenTelemetry to produce metrics. The code will require the OpenTelemetry API and SDK packages, which we&apos...