Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As the amount of telemetry being collected continues to grow exponentially, businesses are continuously seeking cost-effective ways to monitor and analyze their systems. Data collection and monitoring can be expensive, especially when dealing with large volumes of logs. One approach to maintaining visibility while reducing the amount of data collected is through creating log-based metrics.

OpenTelemetry is enabling a revolution in how Observability data is collected and transmitted. See our What Is OpenTelemetry post on why this is an important inflection point in the Observability space. In this post, we’ll walk through how to configure the OpenTelemetry Gems within a Rails app.

OpenTelemetry was launched in May 2019, as a merger of the OpenCensus and OpenTracing projects. The open-source, vendor-neutral project resides within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which virtually ensures its longevity and widespread adoption. In fact, OpenTelemetry has gained significant traction in recent years, with support from many major cloud providers and the tech industry.

Avoiding vendor lock-in is a ‘must’ when it comes to working with new services. Those in ITOps, DevOps, or as an SRE also don’t want to be tied to specific vendors when it comes to their telemetry data. And that’s why OpenTelemetry’s popularity has surged lately. OpenTelemetry prevents you from being locked into specific vendors for the agents that collect your data.

We recently introduced the LogicMonitor Exporter which is now a part of OpenTelelemetry Collector Contrib distro. This allows you to bring your collector for streaming telemetry data from your environment to LM Envision, LogicMonitor’s hybrid and multi-cloud monitoring platform. LogicMonitor associates the exported logs and traces from a single OpenTelemetry collector to simplify your application’s operations and troubleshoot issues.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the adoption of cloud-native technologies and practices. Established in 2015 as a part of the Linux Foundation, the CNCF has become a prominent open-source organization that aims to develop a standardized and vendor-neutral cloud-native stack. The CNCF seeks to enable the use of cloud-native computing for building scalable and resilient applications in dynamic environments.

AppSignal integrates seamlessly with Prisma via OpenTelemetry to give you invaluable insights into how your application is performing. In this blog post, we'll outline how you can use AppSignal to optimize your application's Prisma integration, mitigate inefficient database queries, spot anomalies, and improve your application's scalability.

At KubeCon Europe, it was announced that Elastic Common Schema (ECS) has been accepted by OpenTelemetry (OTel) as a contribution to the project. The goal is to achieve convergence of ECS and OpenTelemetry’s Semantic Conventions (SemConv) into a single open schema that is maintained by OpenTelemetry. This FAQ details Elastic’s contribution of Elastic Common Schema to OpenTelemetry, how it will help drive the industry to a common schema, and its impact on observability and security.

At Lightstep, we’ve seen many organizations grapple with “cloud-native sticker shock” as they come to understand that these complex systems require sifting through massive amounts of data across architectures and proprietary solutions. In today’s macroeconomic environment, organizations are looking to reduce costs while driving innovation, especially when it comes to cloud-native applications.