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At Grafana Labs, we are constantly improving our feature set, and tracing is no different. Traces are often overshadowed by logs and metrics, but they’re a pillar of observability for a reason. Used correctly, organizations that can quickly and successfully follow a chain of events through a system gain a more holistic view of their systems and are better equipped to find and fix issues faster.

In the context of application performance monitoring (APM) and observability, traces and spans are fundamental concepts that help users to track and understand the flow of requests and operations within a system. They are essential in assisting users to identify bottlenecks, troubleshoot issues, and optimize application performance.

In today’s rapidly evolving software landscape, ensuring observability is crucial for building robust and reliable applications. One of the critical components of observability is metrics, which provide valuable insights into the performance and behavior of our systems. OpenTelemetry, an open-source observability framework, offers a standardized approach to capturing, exporting, and analyzing metrics. This blog post explores seven OpenTelemetry metrics for tracking better visibility.

Get excited about Grafana Tempo 2.2! Not only is this release on time, but it is also chock full of TraceQL features and performance improvements. I was honestly a little shocked by how much we have accomplished in the last three months when summarizing the changelog.

When it comes to monitoring Golang applications, there are various tools and practices you can use to gain insights into your application's performance, resource usage, and potential issues. By using OpenTelemetry for monitoring in your Go applications, you can gain valuable insights into the behavior, performance, and resource utilization of your distributed systems, allowing you to troubleshoot issues, optimize performance, and improve the overall reliability of your software.

gRPC (Google Remote Procedure Call) is a high-performance, open-source universal RPC framework that Google developed to achieve high-speed communication between microservices. gRPC has Protobuf (protocol buffers) by default which would format or serialize the messages to a specific format that will be highly packed, highly efficient data. By its virtue of being a lightweight RPC, gRPC is suited for many use-cases. gRPC can be considered a successor to RPC, which is light in weight.

In this article, we will implement distributed tracing for a Golang application with three microservices. To implement distributed tracing, we will be using open-source solutions - SigNoz and OpenTelemetry, so you can easily follow the tutorial.

The OpenTelemetry Go project now supports automatic instrumentation via eBPF! This is a big milestone for the project and makes it significantly easier to generate data from your Go apps: The automatic instrumentation agent is still in s/alpha/beta today, but it’s ready for you to try on your applications!

Native support for OpenTelemetry metrics in Prometheus.