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

Chapter 6: Logging – Capturing Events

Metrics and traces go a long way in helping understand the behaviors and intricacies of cloud-native applications. Sometimes though, it's useful to log additional information that can be used at debug time. Logging gives us the ability to record information in a way that is perhaps more flexible and freeform than either tracing or metrics. That flexibility is both wonderful and terrible. It allows logs to be customized to fit whatever need arises using natural language, which often, but not always, makes it easier to interpret by the reader. But the flexibility is often abused, resulting in a mess of logs that are hard to search through and even harder to aggregate in any meaningful way. This chapter will take a look at how OpenTelemetry tackles the challenges of logging and how it can be used to improve the telemetry generated by an application. We will cover the following topics:

  • Configuring OpenTelemetry to export logs
  • ...