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

With the knowledge of this chapter ingrained in our minds, we have now covered the core signals that OpenTelemetry helps produce. Understanding how to produce telemetry by manually instrumenting code is a building block on the road to improving observability. Without telemetry, the job of understanding what a system is doing is much more difficult.

In this chapter, we learned about the purpose of the logging implementation in OpenTelemetry, as well as how it is intended to co-exist with existing logging implementations. After configuring the logging pipeline, we learned how to use the OpenTelemetry API to produce logs and compared doing so with using a standard logging API. Returning to the grocery store, we explored how logging can be correlated with traces and metrics. This allowed us to understand how we may be able to leverage OpenTelemetry logging within existing applications to improve our ability to use log statements when debugging applications.

Finally, we scratched...