How do you go from A to Z with observability and OpenTelemetry? This post answers a question we hear often: “How do I get started on instrumentation with OpenTelemetry, while also following best practices for the long-term?” This article is all about taking you from A to Z on instrumentation. This will help you: We will use a simple greeting service application written in Node.js to understand the journey. You can find the pre-instrumented state here.

OpenTelemetry is one of the most fascinating and ambitious open source projects of this era. It’s currently the second most active project in the CNCF (the Cloud Native Computing Foundation), with only Kubernetes being more active. I was at KubeCon Europe last month, delivering a talk on OpenTelemetry and it was amazing to see the full house and the excitement and interest around the project.

At incident.io we use gorm.io as the ORM library for our Postgres database, it’s a really powerful tool and one I’m very glad for after years of working with hand-rolled SQL in Go & Postgres apps. You may have seen from our other blog posts that we’re heavily invested in tracing, specifically with Google Cloud Tracing via OpenCensus libraries.