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

Flask library instrumentor

Like the Requests library, the Flask instrumentation library contains an implementation of the BaseInstrumentor interface. The code is available in the OpenTelemetry Python contrib repository at https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-python-contrib/blob/main/instrumentation/opentelemetry-instrumentation-flask/src/opentelemetry/instrumentation/flask/__init__.py. The implementation leverages a few different aspects of the Flask library to achieve instrumentation. It wraps the original Flask app and registers a callback via the before_request method. It then provides a middleware to execute instrumentation code at response time. This allows the instrumentation to capture the beginning and the end of requests through the library.

Additional configuration options

The following options are available to configure FlaskInstrumentor further:

  • excluded_urls: Supports a comma-separated list of regular expressions for excluding specific URLs from...