Kubernetes is the most popular container orchestration tool for cloud-based web development. According to Statista, more than 50% of organizations used Kubernetes in 2021. This may not surprise you, as the orchestration tool provides some fantastic features to attract developers. DaemonSet is one of the highlighted features of Kubernetes, and it helps developers to improve cluster performance and reliability.

Roaming in the world of cloud technology not only helps you take a glance at the realm of cutting-edge technology but also helps you get familiar with concepts such as monitoring and observability. This article will cover an introduction to monitoring and the need for monitoring applications. From here, we will look at how you can utilize the data received when monitoring an application. This will allow us to understand how the concept of observability fits in with monitoring.

In this post, we’ll look at how you can use OpenTelemetry to monitor your unit tests and send that data to Honeycomb to visualize. It’s important to note that you don’t need to adopt Honeycomb, or even OpenTelemetry, in your production application to get the benefit of tracing. This example uses OpenTelemetry purely in the test project and provides great insights into our customer’s code. We’re going to use xUnit as the runner and framework for our tests.

There have been amazing articles on the subjects of migrating from a monolith to a microservice architecture e.g. this is probably one of the better examples. The benefits and drawbacks of the architectures should be pretty clear. I want to talk about something else though: the strategy. We build monoliths since they are easier to get started with. Microservices usually rise out of necessity when our system is already in production.

The scenario: you want to see distributed traces, maybe for your web app. You’ve set up an OpenTelemetry collector to receive OTLP traces in JSON over HTTP, and send those to Honeycomb (how to do that is another post, and we’ll link it here when it’s up).

Honeycomb Play is an interactive sandbox that lets users explore Honeycomb’s data-enriched UI through a guided scenario. The hands-on experience takes a deep dive into how Honeycomb enables you to identify issues, assess their impact, and diagnose their causes for remediation. There is no requirement to sign up—simply dive in and get started right away!

In the race to create more sophisticated apps, microservices and scalable cloud environments, monitoring is not enough. As environments gain complexity, an observability mindset is paramount in transforming data into mission-critical insights.