Observability & monitoring can be challenging when it comes to distributed applications, serverless architectures being a typical examples of that. As with any other service that we run, we need to understand how our Lambda functions are executed, how to identify issues, and how to optimize performance.

I recently read this thread in the CNCF slack from someone wanting to send metrics and traces directly to Postgres. Reasonable enough right? After all once your data is in postgres you can query it to your heart’s content. And isn’t the general culture of OpenTelemetry that you should be able to do all of Observability without resorting to SaaS tools? The thread, however, is pretty universally opposed to this approach; and I have to say that I agree.

If you are a SaaS provider making an application that deals with, say, a health registry or some personal information of the public, you realize how crucial it is to maintain their confidentiality. It is these situations that demand a previous encryption of data followed by a prompt tracing mechanism that finds out the faults right at the moment or prior to its occurrence. And what better way to keep track of your application than tracing?

Distributed tracing enhances observability by providing detailed insights into the performance, behavior, and dependencies of your distributed system. It empowers you to proactively identify and resolve issues, optimize performance, and deliver a reliable and high-performing application.

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is an open source, vendor-neutral observability framework that supplies APIs, SDKs, and tools for the instrumentation of applications and services. As part of our ongoing commitment to OTel, we are excited to announce support for the ingestion and visualization of runtime metrics from OTel-instrumented applications in Java, .NET, and Go.

In microservices architectures, apps are broken down into small, independent services that communicate with each other using APIs in a synchronous or asynchronous way.

Since ServiceNow launched the Service Graph Connector for OpenTelemetry in the Innovation Lab in April 2023, we’ve seen customers use it in pre-production environments. Today, I’m excited to announce that the Service Graph Connector for OpenTelemetry is generally available for production. Service Graph Connectors allow customers to load large volumes of data quickly and easily into their configuration management database (CMDB).

OpenTelemetry and OpenTracing are two related open source projects that aim to provide observability in modern distributed systems. While they have similar goals, there are some differences between them. Let's explore each project and their characteristics.