Distributed tracing is a powerful technique that allows you to track the flow and timing of requests as they navigate through a system. By linking operations and requests between multiple services, distributed tracing provides valuable insights into system performance and helps identify bottlenecks. In this blog post, we will delve into the benefits of distributed tracing, explore its relevance for various application architectures, and uncover how it operates behind the scenes.

OpenTelemetry vs. Prometheus - Difference in architecture, and metrics.

OpenTelemetry is a popular open-source project that provides a standardized way of collecting, processing, and exporting telemetry data from distributed systems. It is designed to be vendor-neutral and supports multiple programming languages and platforms. OpenTelemetry consists of several components that work together to enable telemetry collection and processing.

As an SRE, have you ever had a situation where you were working on an application that was written with non-standard frameworks, or you wanted to get some interesting business data from an application (number of orders processed for example) but you didn’t have access to the source code?

Salt Security had deployed OpenTelemetry but found it insufficient. So the company engineers evaluated Helios, which visualizes distributed tracing for fast troubleshooting. My role as the Director of Platform Engineering at Salt Security lets me pursue my passion for cloud-native tech and for solving difficult system-design challenges. One of the recent challenges we solved had to do with visibility into our services. Or lack thereof.

What do you do when things break in production? Debugging microservices isn’t a walk in the park. Microservices are designed to be loosely coupled, which makes them more scalable and resilient, but also more difficult to debug. When a problem occurs in a microservices app, it can be difficult to track down the source of the problem. When the problem is in production, the clock is ticking and you have to resolve the issues fast.

OpenMetrics and OpenTelemetry are two popular frameworks that provide metrics-driven insight into complex software environments. Understanding the differences between these two options is critical for organizations looking to optimize their monitoring capabilities. In this article, we will explore the key features, benefits, and considerations of OpenMetrics and OpenTelemetry to help you make an informed decision when choosing the right solution for your organization.