Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Ruby on Rails is a popular MVC framework for creating web applications. It is necessary to monitor your Ruby applications for performance issues. In today’s cloud-native and microservices-based architecture, it is difficult for engineering teams to troubleshoot performance issues. Tracing your application can give the much needed context required to troubleshoot performance issues.

The OpenTelemetry members at observIQ are excited to add Microsoft IIS metric monitoring support to OpenTelemetry! You can now easily monitor your IIS web servers with the oIQ OpenTelemetry Collector. You can add the IIS metric receiver to any OpenTelemetry collector. This post demonstrates just one configuration for shipping metrics with OpenTelemetry components. This configuration and many other observIQ OpenTelemetry configurations are available in the oIQ Opentelemetry Collector.

Dear Miss O11y, How is modern observability using tracing, such as Honeycomb, different from the previous distributed tracing software I'm familiar with, like Dapper, at my company? I haven't really been able to wrap my head around Dapper. Does "advanced" observability mean that it's even more complicated than Dapper is? Auntie Alphabet.

Greetings friends, one and all! Over here on the Field Engineering team, we’re often asked about tracing. Two questions that come up frequently: Do I need to sample my traces? and How do I sample my traces? The folks asking are usually using tracing stores where it’s simply not possible to store all of the traces being generated. Those are great questions and the answers depend on a few different factors.

OpenTelemetry can be used to instrument your Elixir applications to generate telemetry data. The telemetry data can then be visualized using an observability tool to monitor your Elixir application performance. In this tutorial, we will use OpenTelemetry Elixir libraries to instrument an Elixir application and then visualize it using SigNoz. Somewhere during the lifetime of an application, it's inevitable that it will have some performance issues.

OpenTelemetry is a set of APIs, SDKs, tooling, and integrations that are designed for the creation and management of telemetry data such as traces, metrics, and logs. One of the main components of OpenTelemetry, or OTel for short, is the OpenTelemetry Collector. The OpenTelemetry Collector, or Otel Collector, is a vendor-agnostic proxy that can receive, process, and export telemetry data.

Properly leveraging telemetry is a true game-changer for any IT department looking to optimize and stabilize its systems. Telemetry provides the first step to answering the all-important question, “What’s happening in my network?” It’s your eye into the inner workings of your system, giving you a view into how different components are performing.

The recent release of Grafana 8.5 marks the start of enabling the jump from traces directly to Splunk logs. It’s a big leap that now allows you to draw a straight line between your traces — whether they are coming from Tempo, Zipkin, or Jaeger — to even more third-party logging data, all from the comfort of your traces view. Previously, the Grafana trace to logs enablement included only Loki logs.

Application Monitoring, or Application Tracing, is an important piece of Observability within your application and stack. Application tracing involves installing an API and/or SDK in your application which then instruments, or wraps your application code with other code that measures the time spent in certain areas of your code, and adds important contextual information to the traces.

In a previous blog post, Adam Quan presented a great introduction to setting up observability for a Spring Boot application. For metrics, Adam used the Prometheus Java Client library and showed how to link metrics and traces using exemplars. However, the Prometheus Java Client library is not the only way to get metrics out of a Spring Boot app. One alternative is to use the OpenTelemetry Java instrumentation agent for exposing Spring’s metrics directly in OpenTelemetry format.