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 7: Instrumentation Libraries

Understanding the ins and outs of the OpenTelemetry API is quite helpful for manually instrumenting code. But what if we could save ourselves some of that work and still have visibility into what our code is doing? As covered in Chapter 3, Auto-Instrumentation, one of the initial objectives of OpenTelemetry is providing developers with tools to instrument their applications at a minimal cost. Instrumentation libraries combined with auto-instrumentation enable users to start with OpenTelemetry without learning the APIs, and leverage the community's efforts and expertise.

This chapter will investigate the components of auto-instrumentation, how they can be configured, and how they interact with instrumentation libraries. Diving deeper into the implementation details of instrumentation libraries will allow us to understand precisely how telemetry data is produced. Although telemetry created automatically may seem like magic, we'll seek...