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

Choosing the right OpenTelemetry instrument

We're now ready to generate metrics from our application. If you recall, in tracing, the tracer produces spans, which are used to create distributed traces. By contrast, the meter does not generate metrics; an instrument does. The meter's role is to produce instruments. OpenTelemetry offers many different instruments to record measurements. The following figure shows a list of all the instruments available:

Figure 5.3 – OpenTelemetry instruments

Each instrument has a specific purpose, and the correct instrument depends on the following:

  • The type of measurement being recorded
  • Whether the measurement must be done synchronously
  • Whether the values being recorded are monotonic or not

For synchronous instruments, a method is called on the instrument when it is time for a measurement to be recorded. For asynchronous instruments, a callback method is configured at the instrument&apos...