The OpenTelemetry Collector is an application written in Go. The GitHub readme does a great job of describing it: So the OpenTelemetry collector is a Go binary that does exactly what its name implies: it collects data and sends it to a back-end. But there’s a lot of functionality that lies in between. What a neat service! A local destination for data that handles the final sending of Open Telemetry information to your back end.
In this article, I’m going to walk you through adding attributes to your spans in.NET that contain information about the code that generated the span. We’ll also look at ways to do this automatically using a library I’ve created.
An app that works as expected is great, but if expected means a beachball for 10 seconds before the page loads, that’s… not so great. Customers want it all; an application that is stable and fast… Luckily, Sentry does more than tell you when something is broken in your code, it also tells you what’s slow and how to fix it.
Tracing is often the last thought in any observability strategy. While engineers prioritize logs and metrics, tracing is truly the hallmark of a mature observability platform, but it is also the most difficult to implement. Once tracing is in place, engineers typically discover something else – many tracing solutions aren’t particularly feature-rich.
Observability is a mindset that lets you use data to answer questions about business processes. In short, collecting as much data as possible from the components of your business — including applications and key business metrics — then using an AI-powered tool to help consolidate and make sense of this huge volume of data gives you observability into your business. Having observability for your business and applications lets you make smarter decisions, faster.
Log tracking, trace log, or logging traces… Although these three terms are easy to interchange (the wordplay certainly doesn’t help!), compare tracing vs. logging, and you’ll find they are quite distinct. Logs, traces, and metrics are the three pillars of observability, and they all work together to measure application performance effectively. Let’s first understand what logging is.
