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

Summary

We've covered much ground in this chapter about the metrics signal. We started by familiarizing ourselves with the different components and terminology of the metrics pipeline and how to configure them. We then looked at all the ins and outs of the individual instruments available to record measurements and used each one to record sample metrics.

Using views, we learned to aggregate, filter, and customize the metric streams being emitted by our application to fit our specific needs. This will be handy when we start leveraging instrumentation libraries. Finally, we returned to the grocery store to get hands-on experience with instrumenting an existing application and collecting real-world metrics.

Metrics is a deep topic that goes well beyond what has been covered in this chapter, but hopefully, what you've learned thus far is enough to start considering how OpenTelemetry can be used in your code. The next chapter will look at the third and final signal we will...