Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Tracing has always been a key use case for time series data. But admittedly, it’s also one that past versions of InfluxDB could not handle as well as we wanted. One of the roadblocks was the cardinality issue. Tracing data is, almost by definition, high cardinality data and prior to InfluxDB IOx, high cardinality data could affect query performance.

After a period of beta testing, we're happy to announce the launch of our latest AppSignal for Node.js package. This package features six new integrations and uses the OpenTelemetry framework for reliable telemetry data collection. OpenTelemetry is an open standard that facilitates the instrumentation of standardized telemetry data collection. AppSignal is committed to using OpenTelemetry in new integrations, and our Node.js integration is the first to use the standard.

AppSignal is a strong supporter of open-source technology. We owe so much of our modern world to the unseen, hard-working software developers who build and maintain the many technologies that make everything from reading this article to sending a message from your phone possible. That's why we're investing in OpenTelemetry, the open-source standard for telemetry data collection, rather than developing our own independent standard.

The drive for faster, more scalable services is on the rise. Our day-to-day lives depend on apps, from a food delivery app to have your favorite meal delivered, to your banking app to manage your accounts, to even apps to schedule doctor’s appointments. These apps need to be able to grow from not only a features standpoint but also in terms of user capacity. The scale and need for global reach drives increasing complexity for these high-demand cloud applications.

Redundant logs are a common nuisance in observability pipelines of all kinds. In large environments, excess logs can multiply data costs to unsustainable amounts. Log sampling is the process of randomly sampling logs to produce the same valuable insight with dramatically reduced data flow. Configuring agents in a pipeline to appropriately sample logs can be a pain. Pipeline managers, like BindPlane OP, make that process simple and scalable.

Today the Grafana Agent team is excited to announce the release of Grafana Agent v0.29.0. This September, we introduced a new way to easily run and configure Grafana Agent called Grafana Agent Flow, our new dynamic configuration runtime built on components. Within Flow, we are also embracing Grafana Labs’ big tent philosophy by introducing OpenTelemetry (OTel) Collector components and converters for traces, metrics, and logs in Agent v0.29.0.

When teams collect data without full observability of what others on the team can see, it becomes clear that no one’s picture is truly accurate. In this picture, all of the people are wearing blindfolds and feeling around to see what is in front of them. One thinks this creature is a spear, another thinks it is a tree trunk, and another a rope. As long as they cannot observe what the others can, there is poor data fidelity.

In the last few years, the usage of databases that charge by request, query, or insert—rather than by provisioned compute infrastructure (e.g., CPU, RAM, etc.)—has grown significantly. They’re popular for a lot of the same reasons that serverless compute functions are, as the cost will scale with your usage. No one is using your site? No problem: you’re not charged.

OpenTelemetry and Prometheus are classified as monitoring tools, but they also have significant differences that your company should know about. For cloud-native applications, OpenTelemetry is the future of instrumentation. It’s the first critical step that allows companies to monitor and improve application performance. OpenTelemetry also supports multiple programming languages and technologies.

TL;DR: proposal (and a survey) to deprecate native Jaeger exporters in OpenTelemetry SDKs in favor of OTLP exporters.