Open Telemetry represents an effort to combine distributed tracing, metrics and logging into a single set of system components and language-specific libraries. Recently, OpenTelemetry became a CNCF incubating project, but it already enjoys quite a significant community and vendor support. OpenTelemetry defines itself as “an observability framework for cloud-native software”, although it should be able to cover more than what we know as “cloud-native software”.

Plenty of blogs have answered the very Google-able question, “What is OpenTelemetry?” To keep it short and sweet, OpenTelemetry is a collaborative effort across the observability space to create industry-wide standards that will benefit all cloud service providers and observability customers. Technically speaking, OpenTelemetry is a collection of APIs, SDKs, exporters, and collectors.

Setting up observability and robust monitoring for distributed systems is a challenging task. Engineering teams need access to different pieces of information to understand what's happening with their application. Is OpenTelemetry a step in the right direction for distributed tracing? Let's find out. Nothing can guarantee how your systems will behave in production. Things will go wrong, and it's critical to monitor your application for any signs that need troubleshooting.

There’s no strict definition of a distributed system. But generally speaking, if you have reached a point where you’re running more than five interdependent services at once, that means you’re running a distributed system. It also means you are more than likely experiencing difficulties when troubleshooting using traditional debugging tools. Unfortunately, pulling up multiple tools, each built for a monolithic world, doesn’t help pinpoint the problem.

In this blog series, we are covering application instrumentation steps for distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry standards across multiple languages. Earlier, we covered Golang Application Instrumentation for Distributed Traces and DotNet Application Instrumentation for Distributed Traces. Here we are going to cover the instrumentation for Java.

We launched the Stanza log agent just over one year ago. Stanza is the result of an uncompromising stance on performance, processing, and configurability for log telemetry. It took mere days for friends and colleagues in the space to raise the obvious objection – there are already so many logging agents, so why spend time on a *new* one? We also heard from competitors who had a snarkier take…