Comprehensive observability starts with good instrumentation. OpenTelemetry, aka “OTel,” sets a unified standard, enabling you to instrument your applications once, then send that data to any backend observability tool of choice. OpenTelemetry’s standard for generating and ingesting telemetry data is slated to become as ubiquitous as current container orchestration standards. Because of this, development teams are increasingly adopting OpenTelemetry to their applications.
HashiCorp Consul began as an open-source project for service discovery. It has evolved to provide other valuable functionality like secure service mesh to help secure microservice architectures based on service identity, but also the ability to achieve repeatable application deployment lifecycles via Network Infrastructure Automation and control access to the service mesh via Consul API Gateway.These features are considered the four core pillars of Consul service networking.
Apache Kafka is a high-throughput, low-latency platform for handling real-time data feeds. Its storage layer is in essence a massively scalable pub/sub message queue designed as a distributed transaction log. It can be used to process streams of data in real-time, building up a commit log of changes. Kafka has strong ordering guarantees that enable it to handle all sorts of dataflow patterns including very low latency messaging and efficient multicast publish / subscribe.
In this post, we’ll look at how to host the OpenTelemetry Collector in Azure Container Apps. There are a few gotchas with how it’s deployed, so hopefully this will stop you from hitting the same issues. If you don’t care about the details and just want to run a script, I’ve created one here.
There are a few key differences between distributed tracing and OpenTelemetry. One is that OpenTelemetry offers a more unified approach to instrumentation, while distributed tracing takes a more granular approach. This means that OpenTelemetry can be less time-consuming to set up, but it doesn’t necessarily offer as much visibility into your system as distributed tracing does.
Have you ever tried to find a bug in a multi-layered architecture? Although this might sound like a simple enough task, it can quickly become a nightmare if the system doesn’t have proper monitoring. And the more distributed your system is, the more complex it becomes to analyze the root cause of a problem. That’s precisely why observability is key in distributed systems. Observability can be thought of as the advanced version of application monitoring.