Distributed tracing enhances observability by providing detailed insights into the performance, behavior, and dependencies of your distributed system. It empowers you to proactively identify and resolve issues, optimize performance, and deliver a reliable and high-performing application.

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is an open source, vendor-neutral observability framework that supplies APIs, SDKs, and tools for the instrumentation of applications and services. As part of our ongoing commitment to OTel, we are excited to announce support for the ingestion and visualization of runtime metrics from OTel-instrumented applications in Java, .NET, and Go.

Since ServiceNow launched the Service Graph Connector for OpenTelemetry in the Innovation Lab in April 2023, we’ve seen customers use it in pre-production environments. Today, I’m excited to announce that the Service Graph Connector for OpenTelemetry is generally available for production. Service Graph Connectors allow customers to load large volumes of data quickly and easily into their configuration management database (CMDB).

Insightful proof-of-concepts with a tool can be difficult to undertake due to the demands on valuable resources: time, energy, and people. With a task as grand as observability, how could one truly test if Honeycomb and OpenTelemetry are right for their organization and meet their requirements? For this thought experiment, here’s a comprehensive description of the ideal product evaluation over the course of four weeks, given unlimited resources.

Arguably, OpenTelemetry exists to (greatly) increase usage of tracing and metrics among developers. That said, logging will continue to play a critical role in providing flexible, application-specific, event-driven data. Further, OpenTelemetry has the potential to bring added value to existing application logging flows.

Connect your metrics to your traces with exemplars to quickly troubleshoot and resolve latency issues.

Open source Zipkin offers a robust set of features that make it easier for developers to understand and optimize complex distributed systems. Distributed tracing is a technique you can use to trace and monitor requests propagating through a distributed system. It can work in environments where multiple services process a request, making it an essential tool for modern microservices architectures. Zipkin is an open source distributed tracing system for monitoring and troubleshooting complex systems.