To successfully observe modern digital platforms, a new data collection approach was needed. And OpenTelemetry (OTel) was the answer - an industry-agreed open standard - not a single vendor's approach - on how observability (O11y) data should be collected from a platform. This separates out data collection from the vendors’ platform of data processing and visualisation, making the data collecting approach vendor agnostic.

In the last 12 months, there’s been significant progress in the OpenTelemetry project -- arriving in the form of contributions, stability, and adoption. Being such, it felt a good time to refresh this post, providing project newcomers a short guide to get up and running quickly. In this post, I'll step through.

OpenTelemetry (OTEL) is an observability platform designed to generate and collect telemetry data across various observability pillars, and its popularity has grown as organizations look to take advantage of it. It’s the most active Cloud Native Computing Foundation project after Kubernetes, and it’s progressing at an immense pace on many fronts. The core project is expanding beyond the “three pillars” into new signals, such as continuous profiling.

PromCon, the annual Prometheus community conference, is around the corner, and this year I’ll have exciting news to share from the Prometheus Java community: The highly anticipated 1.0.0 version of the Prometheus Java client library is here! At Grafana Labs, we’re big proponents of Prometheus. And as a maintainer of the Prometheus Java client library, I highly appreciate the support, as it helps us to drive innovation in the Prometheus community.

Observability and security are converging, benefiting dev and security teams. Runtime observability is the missing component to this important endeavor, providing much-needed data and insights to DevSecOps and AppSec teams.

In OpenTelemetry metrics, there are two temporalities, Delta and Cumulative and the OpenTelemetry community has a good guide on the different trade-offs of each. However, the guide tackles the problem from the SDK end. It does not cover the complexity that arises from the collection pipeline. This post takes that into account and covers the architecture and considerations that are involved end-to-end for picking the temporality.

Apache Kafka, born at LinkedIn in 2010, has revolutionized real-time data streaming and has become a staple in many enterprise architectures. As it facilitates seamless processing of vast data volumes in distributed ecosystems, the importance of visibility into its operations has risen substantially. In this blog, we’re setting our sights on the step-by-step deployment of a containerized Kafka cluster, accompanied by a Python application to validate its functionality. The cherry on top?

OpenTelemetry vs. OpenTracing - differences, evolution, and ways to migrate to OpenTelemetry.