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.

According to Statistia, the total number of data breaches reached an all-time high of 3,205 in 2023, affecting more than 350 million individuals worldwide. These breaches primarily occurred in the Healthcare, Financial Services, Manufacturing, Professional Services, and Technology sectors. The mishandling of sensitive log data provides an on-ramp to many of the most common attack vectors.

Turning logs into metrics isn’t a new concept. A version of this functionality is implemented in most agents, visualization tools, and backends. It’s everywhere because converting logs to metrics has many practical applications and is one of the fundamental mechanisms for controlling log volume in a telemetry pipeline. In this post, I’ll briefly overview log-based metrics, explain why they matter, and provide examples of how to build them using OpenTelemetry and BindPlane OP.

At observIQ, we are big believers and contributors to the OpenTelemetry project. In 2023, we noticed project awareness reached an all-time high as we attended trade shows like KubeCon and Monitorama. The project’s benefits of flexibility, performance, and vendor agnosticism have been making their rounds; we’ve seen a groundswell of customer interest.

At observIQ, we’re constantly shipping new features to help users get the most out of BindPlane. In case you missed it, here’s a roundup of all the BindPlane news, updates, and improvements you should know about.

At observIQ, we’ve seen continuous customer interest in scalable and performant observability solutions for Windows environments. As of 2023, Windows is estimated to be deployed to 75% of desktops worldwide. Unsurprisingly, we commonly speak to CTOs, DevOps, and IT managers responsible for managing fleets of thousands of Windows-based end-user and point-of-sale systems in the Financial, Healthcare, Insurance, and Education sectors.

At observIQ, we’re big believers and contributors to the OpenTelemetry project. In 2023, we saw project awareness reach an all-time high as we attended tradeshows like KubeCon and Monitorama. The project’s benefits of flexibility, performance, and vendor agnosticism have been making their rounds; we’ve seen a groundswell of customer interest.

The OpenTelemetry Transformation Language, or OTTL for short, offers a powerful way to manipulate telemetry data within the OpenTelemetry Collector. It can be leveraged in conjunction with OpenTelemetry processors (such as filter, routing, and transform), core components of the OpenTelemetry Collector. It caters to a range of tasks from simple alterations to complex changes.

MySQL is the trusted open-source database management system for many desktop, mobile, web, and cloud applications. Monitoring the performance of MySQL is critical but as the applications expand over multi-cloud, cloud-native, and hybrid cloud, monitoring also grows in complexity. Continuous monitoring and scaling help applications take advantage of MySQL’s capabilities such as reliability, security, flexibility, availability, and performance scalability.

At observIQ, we've seen growing interest in observing the health of Windows systems and applications using OpenTelemetry. Requests on the SQL Server receiver continue to garner the most interest, so let's start there. Below are steps to get up and running quickly with the contrib distribution of the OpenTelemetry collector. We'll be collecting and shipping SQL Server metrics to a popular backend, Google Cloud.