In this blog, we will explore how distributed tracing works in Application Insights and how to use it to diagnose the issues in a distributed application. Azure Application Insights is a powerful tool for monitoring and diagnosing application performance issues and supports distributed tracing. It is an extension of Azure Monitor and provides Application Performance Monitoring features out of the box.

Instrumenting your code is essential to understanding your system’s performance and diagnosing issues as they arise. Traditionally, this was accomplished using proprietary vendor libraries, causing major lock-in. Enter OpenTelemetry. OpenTelemetry is an open-source project that provides a set of APIs, SDKs, and integrations for instrumenting code.

Serverless developers are undoubtedly familiar with the challenge of cold starts, which describe spikes in latency caused by new function containers being initialized in response to increasing traffic. Though cold starts are usually rare in production deployments, it’s still important to understand their causes and how to mitigate their impact on your workload.

This post was originally published on the Tracetest blog. Want to run trace-based tests with Elastic APM? Today is your lucky day. We're happy to announce that Tracetest now integrates with Elastic Observability APM. Check out this hands-on example of how Tracetest works with Elastic Observability APM and OpenTelemetry! Tracetest is a CNCF project aiming to provide a solution for deep integration and system testing by leveraging the rich data in distributed system traces.

Jaeger’s HotROD demo has been around for a few years. It was written with OpenTracing-based instrumentation, including a couple of OSS libraries for HTTP and gRPC middleware, and used Jaeger’s native SDK for Go, jaeger-client-go. The latter was deprecated in 2022, so we had a choice to either convert all of the HotROD app’s instrumentation to OpenTelemetry, or try the OpenTracing-bridge, which is a required part of every OpenTelemetry API / SDK.

At Grafana Labs, we love tracing, which is why we’ve been hard at work on Grafana Tempo, an open source, highly scalable distributed tracing backend. Tempo just had its 2.0 release. In conjunction with that release, we are excited to show off TraceQL — a powerful new query language designed for distributed tracing. In this blog, we’ll provide an overview of why we created TraceQL, how it works, how you can put it to use today, and what we have planned for future iterations.

OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework that provides a vendor-neutral and language-agnostic way to collect and analyze telemetry data. This tutorial will show you how to integrate OpenTelemetry with Amazon AWS Fargate, a container orchestration service that allows you to run and scale containerized applications without managing the underlying infrastructure.

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is an open source, vendor-neutral observability framework that supplies APIs, SDKs, and tools for the instrumentation of cloud-native applications and services. OTel enables you to collect metrics, logs, and traces from a variety of sources and route them to various backends. By itself, however, it can’t help you analyze this data or correlate telemetry from different parts of your stack.