Modern software systems are complex, with multiple services interacting across different environments. Understanding how they behave—tracking performance, identifying bottlenecks, and diagnosing failures—requires more than just collecting data. OpenTelemetry provides a standardized way to gather logs, metrics, and traces, but the real value comes from making that data easy to interpret through visualization.

Today, we’re excited to announce a much-awaited feature in SigNoz: Infrastructure Monitoring, built natively on OpenTelemetry. Infrastructure monitoring is a critical aspect of modern observability. Without proper visibility into your infrastructure resources, troubleshooting issues, optimizing costs, and maintaining performance become challenging.

With more and more people adopting OpenTelemetry and specifically using the tracing signal, I’ve seen an uptick in people wanting to add the entire request and response body as an attribute. This isn’t ideal, as it wasn’t when people were logging the body as text logs. In this blog post, I’ll explain why this is a bad idea, what are the pitfalls, and more importantly, what you should do instead.

In November 2023, we released Grafana Beyla 1.0, the first major milestone in our pursuit of zero-code (and zero-effort) eBPF instrumentation. We delivered a way — through a single command-line — to automatically instrument any application supporting HTTP/gRPC protocols, as well as provide basic network packet flow information.

Until recently, Checkly was telling you what broke in your app. Now, it can also tell you why it broke. We're excited to announce the general availability of Checkly Traces, a new addition to our synthetic monitoring platform that bridges the gap between frontend monitoring and backend observability. By combining synthetic monitoring with distributed tracing, Checkly Traces empowers development teams to detect, diagnose, and resolve issues faster than ever before.

What happens if we put OpenTelemetry, Prometheus 2.x, Prometheus 3.x, and vmagent together for comparison in scraping and pushing data to remote storage?

Understanding how your applications perform is crucial. OpenTelemetry has emerged as a powerful observability framework, offering a standardized approach to collecting telemetry data such as metrics, logs, and traces. For Java developers, the OpenTelemetry Java SDK provides the tools necessary to instrument applications effectively. This guide is all about the OpenTelemetry Java SDK, exploring its components, configuration, and advanced features to help you harness its full potential.

We’ve all worked on that app that hangs just a little too long in weird places, or had that query we could never get to perform just right. The network waterfall in Chrome DevTools can’t quite show us what’s going on behind the scenes, and tracing with OTel (and honestly, tracing in Sentry) was just… hard. Today that changes.