Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

For any software company, a log monitoring tool is a must for collecting, storing, and providing a centralized view of all logs from different applications and hosts for faster anomaly detection, incident resolution, and troubleshooting. They can also help detect security threats and provide audit trails. They are effective in capacity planning, decision-making, and ensuring optimized performance.

In this article, we will use OpenTelemetry to instrument a sample Flask app for traces. Flask is one of the most popular web application frameworks of Python. It consists of Werkzeug WSGI toolkit and Jinja2 template engine. Instrumentation is the biggest challenge engineering teams face when starting out with monitoring their application performance. OpenTelemetry is the leading open-source standard that is solving the problem of instrumentation.

Falcon is a minimalist Python web API framework for building robust applications and microservices. It also compliments many other Python frameworks by providing extra reliability, flexibility, and performance. Using OpenTelemetry, you can monitor your Falcon applications for performance by collecting telemetry signals like traces. Instrumentation is the biggest challenge engineering teams face when starting out with monitoring their application performance.

ELK is the acronym Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana, and combined, it is one of the most popular log analytics tools. Elastic changed the license of Elasticsearch and Kibana from the fully open Apache 2 license to a proprietary dual license. The ELK stack is also hard to manage at scale. SigNoz can be used as a lightweight alternative to the ELK stack.

DataDog is a paid SaaS tool that provides a range of products for monitoring applications and tech infrastructure. While CloudWatch is an Amazon Web Services product that monitors applications running on AWS infrastructure, or using AWS services.