Learn what is OpenTelemetry: The open-source observability framework for collecting and processing telemetry data from applications and systems.

Running a Kubernetes cluster isn’t easy. With all the benefits come complexities and unknowns. In order to truly understand your Kubernetes cluster and all the resources running inside, you need access to the treasure trove of telemetry that Kubernetes provides. With the right tools, you can get access to all the events, logs, and metrics of all the nodes, pods, containers, etc. running in your cluster. So which tool should you choose?

In modern software development, distributed systems have become increasingly common. As systems grow more complex and distributed, it can be challenging to understand how requests or messages move through the system and where bottlenecks may occur. This is where distributed tracing comes in. Distributed tracing is a technique that allows developers and operators to monitor and understand the behavior of complex systems.

Nextjs is a production-ready React framework for building single-page web applications. It enables you to build fast and user-friendly static websites, as well as web applications using Reactjs. Using OpenTelemetry Nextjs libraries, you can set up end-to-end tracing for your Nextjs applications. Nextjs has its own monitoring feature, but it is only limited to measuring the metrics like core web vitals and real-time analytics of the application.

OpenTelemetry can be used to trace Go applications that use Kafka to find performance issues and bugs. OpenTelemetry is an open-source project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) that aims to standardize the generation and collection of telemetry data. Telemetry data includes logs, metrics, and traces. Apache Kafka introduced the ability to add headers to Kafka messages from version 0.11 onwards.

OpenTelemetry is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation(CNCF) project aimed at standardizing the way we instrument applications for generating telemetry data(logs, metrics, and traces). However, OpenTelemetry does not provide storage and visualization for the collected telemetry data. An APM that can ingest telemetry data collected by OpenTelemetry can help you set up a robust observability stack.

Monitoring APIs through enhanced observability has gained traction with the popularity of microservices. Since microservice applications are built as independent and scalable modules, the number of microservices can grow dramatically as the application grows, increasing the complexity drastically. Since APIs work as the connective tissue between microservices, the number of APIs also grows in parallel.

Node.js is a very popular JavaScript runtime for the backend. Its usage has grown steadily in the past years. Some notable users of Node.js include Netflix, PayPal, Uber, and eBay. In this post, you will learn how to add tracing to a Node.js application on AppSignal. You will use an existing Quotes app that talks to a PostgreSQL database to fetch the quotes. Let’s get going!