At incident.io we use gorm.io as the ORM library for our Postgres database, it’s a really powerful tool and one I’m very glad for after years of working with hand-rolled SQL in Go & Postgres apps. You may have seen from our other blog posts that we’re heavily invested in tracing, specifically with Google Cloud Tracing via OpenCensus libraries.
Transaction tracking and tracing are not the same thing. One of the top 10 banks in the world recently chose Nastel and this was their primary reason. They had a Priority 1 request processor incident on the mainframe where high value messages went missing and it took two weeks to find them. They began by looking at another vendor who said that they did transaction tracking. As the customer said, "They will try to tell you that they do transaction tracking, and that took us a while to drill down." So, let me explain the difference between these terms using an analogy.
In this guide, we’ll set up an OpenTelemetry Collector that collects logs and sends them to Grafana Loki running in Grafana Cloud. We will consider two examples for sending logs to Loki via OpenTelemetry Collector. The first one shows how to collect container logs with a Fluent Forward receiver. The second one shows how to collect system logs with a Filelog receiver.
This article was published in The New Stack. For most developers, software development means there is an API for almost everything, hardware is provisioned via the cloud and the core focus is on building only the features most crucial to your business. Of course, all these integrations and modern distributed architectures create their own set of problems. Having full insight into your application has become even more important and is now commonly known as observability.
Monitoring and observability have increased with software applications moving from monolithic to distributed microservice architectures. While observability and application monitoring share similar definitions, they also have some differences. The purpose of both monitoring and observability is to find issues in an application. However, monitoring aims to capture already known issues and display them on a dashboard to understand their root cause and the time they occurred.
The scope of the OpenTelemetry project encompasses how telemetry data is collected, processed, and transmitted. The OpenTelemetry project is not involved with how the data is stored, displayed, or used beyond the collection and transmission phases. The OpenTelemetry Collector is an application written in Go.
