The world is going digital with lightning speed. According to this report by Statista, at the beginning of January 2021, there were 4.66 billion active internet users in the world, which accounts for 59.5 percent of the world's population, and out of this 4.66 billion, around 4.32 billion (92.6%) users have accessed the internet by mobile. All companies regardless of the sector in which they operate, want to use the internet for expanding their business.
The final stage of the popular Software Development Lifecycle after planning, analysis, design, and implementation is maintenance. This is where a full-fledged application running in production is constantly looked after and taken care of. Bugs, bottlenecks, slow database queries, security loopholes, and other issues are discovered and fixed before deploying the updated code. Log records and Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools play a crucial role in software development maintenance.
Gone are the days where software development was slowed down by the top-down, water-fall approach for getting work done. The rigidity of this methodology made for a longer development lifecycle, and it affected the way software was created and deployed.
In this modern era, most companies want to make customers happy using emerging technologies. This is why they utilize multiple types of tools and new technologies to attract customers in their funnel and finally convert them into leads. However, it has some demerits too.
Before we talk about OpenTelemetry, we should talk about telemetry. Telemetry is: And an instrument is: For the purpose of measuring running computer software and systems, our instruments are virtual instruments. That is to say, code that measures other code. It sounds simple: read a measurement and send it to a remote location. In practice, to make that telemetry data useful in today’s cloud-native and ever more complex environments, there are huge logistical and technical hurdles to overcome.
OpenTelemetry is enabling a revolution in how Observability data is collected and transmitted. See our What Is OpenTelemetry post on why this is an important inflection point in the Observability space. In this post, we’ll walk through how to configure the OpenTelemetry Gems within a Rails app.
