You're probably familiar with the concept of real user monitoring (RUM) and how it's used to monitor websites or mobile applications. If not, here's the short version: RUM requires telemetry data, which is generated by an SDK that you import into your web or mobile application. These SDKs then hook into the JS runtime, the browser itself, or various system APIs in order to measure performance.

In the complex world of modern distributed systems, observability is vital. Observability allows engineers to understand what's happening within their systems, debug issues rapidly, and proactively ensure optimal application performance. OpenTelemetry has emerged as a powerful, vendor-neutral solution to address the challenges of observability across different technologies and environments.

Last week we introduced Grafana Alloy, our distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector with built-in Prometheus pipelines and support for metrics, logs, traces, and profiles. We’re excited to see the community embrace Alloy, and we want to help them use and scale it as easily as possible. Many developers that need to deploy and manage software across several hosts turn to Ansible for its ease of use and versatility.

This article touches on how we at Birdie handled our transition from logs towards using OpenTelemetry as the primary mechanism for achieving world-class observability of our systems.

While OpenTelemetry (OTel) supports a wide variety of data sources and is constantly evolving to add more, there are still many data sources for which no receiver exists. Thankfully, OTel contains receivers that accept raw data over a TCP or UDP connection. This blog unveils how to leverage Linux Command Line Interface (CLI) tools, creating efficient data pipelines for ingestion through OTel's TCP receiver.

Earlier, applications were mostly monolithic, meaning that several programs were written in the same language and placed in the same web stack. However, it is no longer the case today. Today, every software is comprised of several small application programs coming together each providing a service of its own. These applications are what we call microservices.

Welcome to the 35th edition of our monthly product newsletter - SigNal 35! We have made significant advancements in enhancing our product. The integration feature we shipped will enable quick-start monitoring for popular technologies in SigNoz. Let’s see what humans of SigNoz were up to in the month of March 2024.

Core Web Vitals (CWV) are Google's preferred metrics for measuring the quality of the user experience for browser web apps. Currently, Core Web Vitals measure loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability. These are the main indicators of what a user’s experience will be while using a web page: Note: As of March 12th, INP has become a stable Core Web Vital, replacing First Input Delay (FID).

Adopting OpenTelemetry native standards for instrumenting and observing applications If you develop applications, you may have heard about OpenTelemetry. At Elastic®, we are enthusiastic about OpenTelemetry as the future of standardized application instrumentation and observability.

Goutham Veeramachaneni, a product manager at Grafana Labs, and Carrie Edwards, a senior software engineer at Grafana Labs, are both contributors to the Prometheus open source project. This post, which they wrote together, was originally published on the Prometheus.io blog in March 2024. The OpenTelemetry project is an observability framework and toolkit designed to create and manage telemetry data such as traces, metrics, and logs.