Practical OpenTelemetry: Adopting Open Observability Standards Across Your Organization

by Daniel Gomez Blanco

Learn the value that OpenTelemetry can bring to organizations that aim to implement observability best practices, and gain a deeper understanding of how different building blocks interact with each other to bring out-of-the-box, vendor-neutral instrumentation to your stack. With examples in Java, this book shows how to use OpenTelemetry APIs and configure plugins and SDKs to instrument services and produce valuable telemetry data. You’ll learn how to maximize adoption of OpenTelemetry and encourage the change needed in debugging workflows to reduce cognitive load for engineers troubleshooting production workloads.

Adopting observability best practices across an organization is challenging. This book begins with a discussion of how operational monitoring processes widely followed for decades fall short at providing the insights needed for debugging cloud-native, distributed systems in production. The book goes on to show how the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s OpenTelemetry project helps you standardize instrumentation and transport of telemetry signals, providing a common language for all observability tooling.

You Will LearnWhy observability is a necessity in modern distributed systemsThe value of OpenTelemetry for engineers and organizations OpenTelemetry component specification and general designTracing, metrics, and logs APIs and SDKs, with examples in JavaOpenTelemetry Collectors and recommended transport and processing pipelinesHow to adopt observability standards across an organization
Who This Book Is For
Software engineers familiar with cloud-native technologies and operational monitoring who want  to instrument and export telemetry data from their services; observability leads who want to roll out OpenTelemetry standards and bestpractices across their organizations; and Java developers who want a book with OpenTelemetry examples in that language

333 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 2, 2023

About the author

Dan is a Principal Engineer at Skyscanner, leading their observability transformation to ensure travellers get a reliable and performant experience when booking their next holiday. He’s a big advocate of open standards and CNCF projects like OpenTelemetry to back the instrumentation and collection of telemetry data. He has worked both in big and small companies and institutions, from CERN to SKIPJAQ, always building software and infrastructure to reduce the cognitive load associated with supporting production services.