Application performance management (APM) has moved beyond traditional monitoring to become an essential tool for developers, offering deep insights into applications at the code level. With APM, teams can not only detect issues but also understand their root causes, optimizing software performance and end-user experiences. The modern landscape presents a wide range of APM tools and companies offering different solutions. Additionally, OpenTelemetry is becoming the open ingestion standard for APM.

In collaboration with F5, ServiceNow® Cloud Observability is pleased to announce the availability of the OpenTelemetry Arrow Project. This co-donated and co-developed project gives organizations greater control over the data extracted from their cloud applications—as well as a path forward to improve the return on investment (ROI) of that data.

This guest post is written by Ian Duncan, Staff Engineer - Stability Team at Mercury. To view the original post, go to Ian's website. At work, we use OpenTelemetry extensively to trace execution of our Haskell codebase. We struggled for several months with a mysterious tracing issue in our production environment wherein unrelated web requests were being linked together in the same trace, but we could never see the root trace span.

In the fast-paced universe of software development, especially in the cloud-native realm, DevOps and SRE teams are increasingly emerging as essential partners in application stability and growth. DevOps engineers continuously optimize software delivery, while SRE teams act as the stewards of application reliability, scalability, and top-tier performance. The challenge?

The OpenTelemetry Collector is a useful application to have in your stack. However, deploying it has always felt a little time consuming: working out how to host the config, building the deployments, etc. The good news is the OpenTelemetry team also produces Helm charts for the Collector, and I’ve started leveraging them. There are a few things to think about when using them though, so I thought I’d go through them here.