Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you’re involved in IT Operations, you’ve probably heard of OpenTelemetry. It’s a hot topic in the observability industry, and for good reason. OpenTelemetry is a set of open-source tools and APIs that make it easy to collect telemetry data from your applications and infrastructure. This data can then be used to monitor your systems, troubleshoot problems, and improve performance.

While many of the popular tools for observability in software are open source, one thing they lack is open design. Most of these solutions, from Nagios to Prometheus, started as a product with an opinionated design, which happened to work well for many people. These became the de facto standards. That position of de facto standard is what every open-source project and every commercial product tries to be.

With observIQ’s latest contributions to OpenTelemetry, you can now use free open source tools to easily monitor Cloudflare. The easiest way to use the latest OpenTelemetry tools is with observIQ’s distribution of the OpenTelemetry collector. You can find it here. In this blog, the Cloudflare receiver is configured to monitor logs locally with OTLP– you can use the receiver to ship logs to many popular analysis tools, including Google Cloud, New Relic, OTLP, Grafana, and more.

It is commonplace for organizations to restrict their IT systems from having direct or unsolicited access to external networks or the Internet, with network proxies serving as gatekeepers between an organization’s internal infrastructure and any external network. Network proxies can provide security and infrastructure admins the ability to specify specific points of data egress from their internal networks, often referred to as an egress controller.

In modern microservices-based applications, it is difficult to get an overview of how requests are performing across multiple services, infrastructure, and protocols. As companies began moving to distributed systems, they realized they needed a way to track requests in their entirety for debugging applications. Distributed tracing is a technology that was born out of this need.

Fluentbit is a popular logs and metrics collector used for monitoring anything from virtual machines to containerized applications. With the rise of BindPlane OP and OpenTelemetry, it is not uncommon for organizations to begin replacing Fluentbit, or integrating OpenTelemetry with Fluentbit. An organization may have hundreds or thousands of Fluentbit agents deployed to their endpoints but they want to manage the pipeline using BindPlane OP.

As an operations engineer (SRE, IT Operations, DevOps), managing technology and data sprawl is an ongoing challenge. Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects are helping minimize sprawl and standardize technology and data, from Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Istio, and more. Kubernetes and OpenTelemetry are becoming the de facto standard for deploying and monitoring a cloud native application.