In today’s cloud-centric, serverless computing landscape, applications are increasingly distributed and complex, composed of numerous microservices, functions, and external dependencies. Azure Functions, a serverless compute service offered by Microsoft Azure, plays a pivotal role in building scalable, event-driven applications.

As the second largest and active Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project, OpenTelemetry is well on its way to becoming the ubiquitous, unified standard and framework for observability. OpenTelemetry owes this success to its comprehensive and feature-rich toolset that allows users to retrieve valuable observability data from their applications with low effort. The OpenTelemetry Java agent is one of the most mature and feature-rich components in OpenTelemetry’s ecosystem.

In an era where “cloud-native” has become synonymous with complexity and distribution, the world of application monitoring faces a profound challenge.

As distributed, interconnected microservices have replaced monolithic applications, application monitoring has had to evolve to support these modern, complex architectures. Rather than monitoring a single application and code base, organizations need to monitor the performance and network connectivity of multiple services that interact with each other.

This is part three in a series where I learn OpenTelemetry (OTEL) from scratch. If you haven't yet seen them yet, part 1 is about setting up auto-instrumented tracing for Node.js and part 2 is where I initially implemented the OTEL collector. Today we are going to begin experimenting with sampling. We need to sample traces because we capture so much data! It would be impractical to process and store it all (in most cases).

Massdriver is a cloud operations platform that makes it easier for engineering teams to build, deploy, and scale cloud-native applications. While many companies use this lofty language to make similar promises, Dave Williams, CTO and co-founder at Massdriver, means it. Before Massdriver, Dave worked in product engineering where he was constantly bogged down with DevOps toil. He spent his time doing everything except what he was hired to do: write software.

MySQL is the trusted open-source database management system for many desktop, mobile, web, and cloud applications. Monitoring the performance of MySQL is critical but as the applications expand over multi-cloud, cloud-native, and hybrid cloud, monitoring also grows in complexity. Continuous monitoring and scaling help applications take advantage of MySQL’s capabilities such as reliability, security, flexibility, availability, and performance scalability.

What is the hidden potential of OpenTelemetry? It goes a lot further than the (awesome) application of tracing and monitoring your software. The OpenTelemetry project is an attempt to standardize how performance is reported and how trace data is passed around your microservice architecture. This context propagation is a superpower for those who adopt OpenTelemetry tracing.

OpenTelemetry is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation(CNCF) incubating project aimed at standardizing the way we instrument applications for generating telemetry data(logs, metrics, and traces). OpenTelemetry aims to provide a vendor-agnostic observability framework that provides a set of tools, APIs, and SDKs to instrument applications.