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

Requests library instrumentor

The Instrumentor interface provides instrumentation libraries with the minimum requirements a library must provide to support auto-instrumentation. Implementors must provide an implementation for _instrument and _uninstrument, that's all. The instrumentation implementation details vary from one library to another depending on whether the library offers any event or callback mechanisms for instrumentation. In the case of the Requests library, the opentelemetry-instrumentation-requests library relies on monkey patching the Session.request and Session.send methods from the requests library. This instrumentation library does the following:

  1. Provides a wrapper method for the library calls that it instruments, and intercepts calls through those wrappers
  2. Upon invocation, creates a new span by calling the start_as_current_span method of the OpenTelemetry API, ensuring the span name follows semantic conventions
  3. Injects the context information...