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

Customizing metric outputs with views

Some applications may produce more metrics than an application developer is interested in. You may have noticed this with the example code for instruments; as we added more examples, it became difficult to find the metrics we were interested in. Recall the example mentioned earlier in this chapter: application A represents a client library making web requests that could produce metrics via three different meters. If each of those meters keeps a request counter, duplicate data is highly likely to be generated. Duplicated data may not be a problem on a small scale, but when scaling services up to handling thousands and millions of requests, unnecessary metrics can become quite expensive. Thankfully, views provide a way for users of OpenTelemetry to configure the SDK only to generate the metrics they want. In addition to providing a mechanism to filter metrics, views can also configure aggregation or be used to add a new dimension to metrics.

Filtering...