Applying OpenTelemetry for Deeper Observability

The observability market is maturing. This evolution is clearly visible in the rise of OpenTelemetry, an open source framework for application performance monitoring and observability.

What is OpenTelemetry?

The OpenTelemetry project is supported by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which is one of the largest organizations in the world dedicated to supporting cloud native technologies. OpenTelemetry provides high quality and portable telemetry to enable effective observability for applications written in many different programming languages and frameworks.

The goal of OpenTelemetry is to provide a standard set of libraries and frameworks that can be used across all cloud native environments, including Kubernetes, OpenShift and others. It includes out-of-the-box support for most popular cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

OpenTelemetry brings consistency across tools, teams and vendors. The power of using OpenTelemetry (aka "OTel"), is that any application component can be enriched with metrics, traces and logs that will deliver great insights that go beyond regular monitoring, without the need to build integrations to individual tools. OpenTelemetry can provide deep insights into the relationships between microservices, cloud resources and other components and even gives insights into user experience and business KPIs.

Benefits of using OpenTelemetry

1. Agnostic across any monitoring solution – OpenTelemetry by itself is not an observability product. It's a flexible framework to instrument application code to collect and send data to multiple participating back-end tools or supported OpenTelemetry collectors. It provides the foundation for IT teams to easily observe system and application behavior, address any performance issues they encounter and use that data to make better decisions about infrastructure.
2. Observability in the hands of your SREs and DevOps teams – While monitoring is often set up by operations and infrastructure teams, OpenTelemetry provides the ability to put the observability instrumentation into the hands of engineering and development teams. They instrument their code and define what they want to observe; then they can learn about their application and its components live, in production. OpenTelemetry shifts the observability responsibility to the left. OpenTelemetry data gives SREs a great foundation: they can set SLAs and SLIs, and then easily measure performance against these goals to continuously improve.
3. Early feedback and deeper visibility – OpenTelemetry makes metrics, logs and traces much easier to obtain, which enables early feedback and deeper visibility. No longer do teams need to watch from the sidelines, they can build a deep understanding of component behavior by directly observing a component's inner workings.
4. Insights into the end customer experience - OpenTelemetry continuously drives the improvement of the end user experience. Think about latency. Very slow response results in a bad customer experience because the request is executed very slowly. This poor performance could result in your customers leaving your application and never coming back.

The Power of using OpenTelemetry

The StackState platform goes beyond visualizing the data provided by OpenTelemetry. Stackstate integrates OpenTelemetry data into our powerful 4T Data Model,

Do you want to learn more? Read the full post on our blog. https://www.stackstate.com/blog/opentelemetry-for-deeper-observability/