Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This article touches on how we at Birdie handled our transition from logs towards using OpenTelemetry as the primary mechanism for achieving world-class observability of our systems.

Today at Google Next, Charity Majors demonstrated how to use Honeycomb to find unexpected problems in our generative AI integration. Software components that integrate with AI products like Google’s Gemini are powerful in their ability to surprise us. Nondeterministic behavior means there is no such thing as “fully tested.” Never has there been more of a need for testing in production!

A few days ago, I was in a meeting with a prospect who was just starting to try out OpenTelemetry. One of the things that they did was to create an observability demo project which contained an HTTP reverse proxy, a web frontend, three microservices, a database, and a message queue. Here’s a rough diagram: Their motivation was to try out OpenTelemetry and see how much effort it took for them to instrument their system.

Core Web Vitals (CWV) are Google's preferred metrics for measuring the quality of the user experience for browser web apps. Currently, Core Web Vitals measure loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability. These are the main indicators of what a user’s experience will be while using a web page: Note: As of March 12th, INP has become a stable Core Web Vital, replacing First Input Delay (FID).

There’s a sentence that strikes fear into the heart of every frontend developer I've ever met: Users are reporting issues, and we don't know how to replicate them. What do you do when that happens? Do you cry? Do you mark the issue as wontfix and move on? Personally, I took the road less traveled: gave up frontend engineering and moved into product management (this is not actually accurate but it's a good joke and it feels truthy).

As a new company poised to transform the financial services industry with its modern money movement platform, Moov wanted an equally modern observability platform as part of the company’s operational tech stack. With Moov's platform hosted in Google Cloud, it uses a diverse range of technologies to allow clients to accept, store, send, and spend money. The integration of numerous software providers further amplifies the complexity of each transaction.

For years, we’ve been installing what vendors have referred to as “agents” that reach into our applications and pull out useful telemetry information from them. From monitoring agents, to full-blown APM tools, this has been the standard for many decades. With OpenTelemetry though, the term “agent” isn’t used as much, and in most scenarios means something slightly different.