A presentation at Infobip Shift in in Zadar, Croatia by Ben Greenberg
TELEMETRY WITHOUT THE TOOL TAX Ben Greenberg @rabbigreenberg
Once upon a time… @rabbigreenberg
@rabbigreenberg
Web development was simpler @rabbigreenberg
What happened? �� @rabbigreenberg
Distributed Architecture @rabbigreenberg Containerization Kubernetes Five Nines
As complexity grows, so does the ecosystem to support it @rabbigreenberg
Maybe you have a similar story to my own? @rabbigreenberg
Hi, my name is Ben Software Developer @rabbigreenberg
I write code @rabbigreenberg
Sometimes, I even write tests @rabbigreenberg
Then one day, something happened… @rabbigreenberg
I discovered Observability was useful �� @rabbigreenberg
But, there’s a lot of tooling out there How do you choose? @rabbigreenberg
3/17 OpenTelemetry is a response to tooling overload and vendor lock-in @rabbigreenberg
Gain critical visibility into your app with one dependency �� @rabbigreenberg
HOW DID IT ALL GET STARTED? The origin story of OTel
The Telemetry Reality: Agents Divided instrumentation APIS SDKs @rabbigreenberg Protocols Collectors
The evolution of the project OpenTracing OpenCensus OpenTelemetry @rabbigreenberg
2015 A vendor neutral standard and set of APIs to trace across microservices @rabbigreenberg @rabbigreenberg
2017 @rabbigreenberg Collect metrics and traces and send to any backend of your choice
2019 @rabbigreenberg A unified point to integrate metrics and traces across all surfaces
2021 @rabbigreenberg v1.0.0 released of the specification
The OTel Perspective: United Instrumentation Metrics Logs Traces @rabbigreenberg
Open standards decrease complexity @rabbigreenberg
HOW DOES IT WORK?
This is your application Construct metric data without concern if it gets consumed by an OTel agent or not This is the OTel API layer The instrumentation layer by language Processor and exporter of the telemetry data https://newrelic.com/blog/best-practices/opentelemetry-concepts @rabbigreenberg
Breaking down the OTel Collector Receiver Accepts telemetry data Processor Exporter Pipeline to process Send the data to a the data backend of your choice (i.e. filter, sample and Formats the telemetry Popular library OTLP (OTel Protocol) Receiver enrich the data) data for the requirements of the chosen backend @rabbigreenberg
TRACES AND METRICS What’s the difference?
Traces 01 Trace is a single request in the system Capturing a Single Request 02 03 @rabbigreenberg Span is a single component of a trace Traces are trees of spans
Metrics 01 Metrics are aggregated measurements Capturing data over time 02 03 @rabbigreenberg Metric data captures a moment in time Metrics are less detailed than traces
Example of Trace API Implementation https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification/blob/main/specification/trace/semantic_conventions/exceptions.md @rabbigreenberg
Example of Metrics API Implementation https://opentelemetry.io/docs/instrumentation/java/manual/ @rabbigreenberg
WHAT TO DO WITH YOUR DATA What happens after you collect?
The new golden rule: Your data is yours @rabbigreenberg
Build Your Own Observability Backend @rabbigreenberg
Uniform specs make building your own backend possible �� @rabbigreenberg
Bring your data to the vendor of your choice @rabbigreenberg
Vendors that support OpenTelemetry @rabbigreenberg
WHY DOES THIS MATTER?
“Tool proliferation Aleksey Vorona InformationWeek remains of the challenging double-edged swords facing DevOps-minded @rabbigreenberg teams.”
“… the DevOps space is Nana Janashia Techworld with nana developing really fast and we see new technologies, new concepts emerging all the time, so many engineers feel pressure to learn new tools to use in their projects.” @rabbigreenberg
OPENTELEMETRY PROVIDES YOU WITH THE DATA YOU NEED…
Without The Tool Tax @rabbigreenberg
THANK YOU! @rabbigreenberg
You want to instrument your application with observability tooling. You understand the benefits of doing so, but when you start investigating you discover a tooling sprawl that makes your head spin. This has been a persistent pain point for engineering teams, and a consistent deterrent to instituting a robust DevOps practice.
Open Telemetry (OTel) comes to try and solve that tool tax for your observability needs. It is an open source project maintained by the community that radically democratizes your application’s metrics, logs and traces, releases you from vendor exclusivity, and reduces your dependencies. In this talk, you will learn about the origin story of OTel, and how to transform your tool sprawl into a focused funnel of data powering your DevOps practice.
The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.
for free. You
can too.