In our line of work, it’s not uncommon to encounter customers that have custom workflows or architectures that may not always support distributed tracing mechanisms. In development in general, we often have our beliefs on what should happen in theory and we rely on Hello-World examples, only to be surprised by what happens in reality. Our customers too sometimes have to build creative solutions to deal with unique situations – which then motivates us to build creative solutions as well.

Distributed tracing is a household term nowadays – if your house is an IT department! Modern enterprises use cloud-native applications for agility and responsiveness to customer needs. When monitoring cloud-native applications, distributed tracing follows how transactions perform while traversing services or containers in the backend architecture. By definition, we’re describing production applications with requests, methods, database calls and logs that accompany a transaction.

If you’re new to OpenTelemetry, like I was, you might be wondering how to quickly get started. OpenTelemetry is becoming the gold standard to collect all of your machine data and is changing observability as we know it. Instead of learning multiple technologies to collect all data, you can leverage a single cloud-native framework to complete your observability.

At Cisco and AppDynamics, we believe that OpenTelemetry™ is the future of observability. To that end, we’re working hard alongside the open source community to ensure the telemetry you collect can be leveraged to deliver the world-class business insights you need.

Nowadays, microservice architecture is a pattern that helps to innovate quicker by enabling easier scalability, giving language flexibility, improving fault isolation, etc. Systems built this way also bring some downsides. Moving parts, concurrent invocations, and different retries policies can make operating and troubleshooting such systems challenging. Without proper tools, correlating logs with metrics may be difficult. To overcome these challenges, you need observability.