Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Many developers don’t know what instrumentation really is, and those who do don’t really understand the black magic that takes an application and makes it emit telemetry, especially when automatic instrumentation is involved. On top of that, each programming language has its own tricks. I wanted to unwrap this loaded topic on my podcast, OpenObservability Talks. For this topic I invited Eden Federman, CTO of Keyval, a company focused on making observability simpler.

When we set out to trace applications running outside of AWS Lambda, there was little doubt in our minds that building on top OpenTelemetry was by far the best course of action. There are many reasons for this, but chiefly, it is a question of coverage. At its most fundamental level, achieving coverage requires as-wide-as-possible support for technologies, and interoperability among instrumentations.

HashiCorp Consul began as an open-source project for service discovery. It has evolved to provide other valuable functionality like secure service mesh to help secure microservice architectures based on service identity, but also the ability to achieve repeatable application deployment lifecycles via Network Infrastructure Automation and control access to the service mesh via Consul API Gateway.These features are considered the four core pillars of Consul service networking.

Comprehensive observability starts with good instrumentation. OpenTelemetry, aka “OTel,” sets a unified standard, enabling you to instrument your applications once, then send that data to any backend observability tool of choice. OpenTelemetry’s standard for generating and ingesting telemetry data is slated to become as ubiquitous as current container orchestration standards. Because of this, development teams are increasingly adopting OpenTelemetry to their applications.

Distributed tracing helps you track requests across services and understand issues affecting your application performance. In distributed cloud architecture, debugging performance issues is complicated. Distributed tracing gives visibility to teams on how a user request performs across different services, protocols, and cloud infrastructure. Let’s start with a brief overview of distributed tracing.

Data costs fill a large column in many organizations’ accounting sheets. Data pipeline setup and management is a large time sink for DevOps, IT, and SRE. Setting up telemetry pipelines to reduce unwanted data often takes even more time that could better be spent creating value rather than reducing costs. This blog will show you one way to quickly set up your data pipeline to filter unnecessary telemetry data.