OpenTelemetry (or “OTel”) helps you get your instrumentation started quickly, and it helps you get the most out of that telemetry data by providing flexible exporting options. As a result, it’s emerging as the new standard for instrumentation. To that end, today we’re sharing more insight into the work we’ve done (and are doing) to enable a path for all Honeycomb users toward OTel adoption. We hope you’ll be as excited as we are to embrace these open standards!

Welcome to Part 1 of our multipart series on Distributed Tracing for Full Stack Developers. In this series, we’ll be learning the ins-and-outs of distributed tracing and how it can assist you in monitoring the increasingly complex requirements of full stack applications.

Use this guide to write a golang application emitting traces using the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) Specification. All you need is a basic understanding of developing applications in golang.

In one of my previous blogs I explained how important it is for a modern observability platform to provide “the observers” full, flexible access to all raw telemetry. Observability’s promise to find unknown unknowns relied directly on the ability of fast, powerful and multidimensional high-cardinality analysis of raw data, to uncover previously unknown patterns that have not yet been visualized as a metric, dashboard panel or an alert or anomaly event.

Running and troubleshooting production services requires deep visibility into your applications and infrastructure. While basic logs and metrics are available out of the box with Google Cloud Compute Engine (GCE), capturing advanced data used to require the installation of both a metrics agent and a logging agent.