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

Configuring OpenTelemetry logging

Unlike with the two signals we covered in Chapter 4, Distributed Tracing, and Chapter 5, Metrics - Recording Measurements, the logging signal in OpenTelemetry does not concern itself with standardizing a logging interface. Many languages already have an established logging API, and a decision early on in OpenTelemetry was made to leverage those pre-existing tools. Although OpenTelemetry provides an API capable of producing logging, which we'll use shortly, the signal is intent on hooking into the existing logging facilities. Its focus is to augment the logs produced and provide a mechanism to correlate those logs with other signals. Figure 6.1 shows us the components of the logging pipeline:

Figure 6.1 – The logging pipeline

These components combine to produce log records and emit them to external systems. The logging pipeline is comprised of the following:

  • A LogEmitterProvider, which provides a mechanism...