On a recent thread on the CNCF Slack’s OTel Collector channel, a user asked a question that shone a light on a topic I don't think has been effectively discussed elsewhere.

In a recent reddit thread, I got into a conversation about justifying the cost of observability. It got to a really basic question about running a tech company: how do you know that any cost is justified? While a small number of expenses have clear and direct business values, a bunch of other costs, I would even say most costs, just aren’t that clear cut.

Are you looking for an OpenTelemetry alternative? Then you've come to the right place. There are no good alternatives to OpenTelemetry if your use case involves generating different types of telemetry signals like logs, metrics, and traces and their collection. In certain use cases, like monitoring only metrics or time-series data, you can use a tool like Prometheus. If you’re sure you want an OpenTelemetry alternative, then let me point you to these three here.

OpenTelemetry is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation(CNCF) project aimed at standardizing the way we instrument applications for generating telemetry data(logs, metrics, and traces). OpenTelemetry lets you export the data it collects to any backend of your choice. In this article, we will discuss some of the top OpenTelemetry tools that are tailored to support OpenTelemetry data, offering valuable insights into the functioning and optimization of applications.

Welcome to the 29th edition of our monthly product newsletter - SigNal 29! We are excited to share important updates from Team SigNoz. We are pleased to announce the public launch of SigNoz cloud. We’ve also raised funding of $6.5M to fuel the next phase of building and growth. We also shipped many improvements to the product. Let’s dive in to see what humans at SigNoz were up to in the month of September 2023.

In today's rapidly evolving landscape of software applications, where complexity often thrives, the need for observability and tracing has never been more pronounced. The ability to comprehend the inner workings of distributed systems and track the journey of requests as they traverse through various components is paramount for maintaining optimal performance and troubleshooting issues. This is where OpenTelemetry, a prominent observability framework, steps in.

In this post, we will talk about OpenTelemetry exporters. OpenTelemetry exporters help in exporting the telemetry data collected by OpenTelemetry. OpenTelemetry frees you from any kind of vendor lock-in by letting you export the collected telemetry data to any backend of your choice. In modern distributed systems, efficiently collecting, transmitting, and analyzing telemetry data from diverse sources poses a significant challenge.

”Isn’t Observability something for Ops to worry about?” I’ve heard this response more than once when talking about how developers should learn OpenTelemetry. I wanted to write this piece to show you how important and how easy it is to learn observability from day one as a coder.

Debugging errors in distributed systems can be a challenging task, as it involves tracing the flow of operations across numerous microservices. This complexity often leads to difficulties in pinpointing the root cause of performance issues or errors. OpenTelemetry provides instrumentation libraries in most programming languages for tracing.

Everyone talks about the need for observability, it even comes up in board meetings. But let’s talk about the reasons you shouldn’t add observability to production.