OpenTelemetry in Practice - Issue #3
Welcome to OpenTelemetry in Practice! In this monthly newsletter you’ll find pointers, resources, and news–the latest in teaching your software to teach you what’s going on.
What is all this? Getting Started with OpenTelemetry
The New Stack interviews Austin Parker, the OTel community manager, and Morgan McLean from the Governance Committee about the OpenTelemetry community demo.
Nice OpenTelemetry basics overview from Ben Hall, a NET developer at gov.UK - short outline of the basic path signals travel from your code to a collector to your monitoring software of choice.
What are all these words? Concepts in OpenTelemetry
Ashok Nagaraj of Cisco does a deep dive into the OpenTelemetry collector, complete with configuration recipes (and follows this post up with sample code for the operator in Kubernetes).
Lambda observability for AWS is here! And sometimes it's still kind of confusing. Oscar Reyes from Tracetest to the rescue with a tutorial about how to instrument everyone's favorite cute creatures, Pokemon!
Special section: Kubernetes & OpenTelemetry
Vijay Samuel, an eBay engineer active within the community, shares the story of migrating from Kubernetes monitoring with Elastic Beats to getting OpenTelemetry signals into their internal observability platform, sherlock.io.
Sascha Grunert of Red Hat talks about improving Kubernetes container runtime using OpenTelemetry, with a short explanation of how to trace a kubelet, over at the Kubernetes blog.
Ask Miss O11y: where did that span come from?
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Question: I added the OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation to our apps, and now we have traces. Where do all these spans come from?
-Yours, Traveling in Trace Land
Hello Traveling in Trace Land -
Each span comes with a clue for what created it. Look for the attribute ‘instrumentation_scope.name’ or ‘library.name’. These attributes are designated by the OTLP spec to reveal the instrumentation code that created the span. So if you see a value like go.opentelemetry.io/contrib/instrumentation/github.com/gorilla/mux/otelmux then you know this came from a service written in Go, and it’s using the gorilla web framework, and the instrumentation for that created the span. If you see ”OpenTelemetry.Instrumentation.AspNetCore,“ then a .NET service includes the ASP.NET Core instrumentation, and that created this span. If you create your own spans, then the value you pass to get a Tracer will wind up in this field.
Really this information belongs in ‘instrumentation_scope.name’ because that is current in the specification. ‘library.name’ is an older attribute name. OpenTelemetry continues to evolve.
-Jessica Kerr / @jessitron
Got a question for Miss O11y? misso11y@honeycomb.io or reply to this newsletter.
Who else is into this? Upcoming OpenTelemetry Events
Tomorrow! Or today depending where you are - OpenTelemetry in Practice is hosting a special set of Holiday Lightning Talks & Stories. Adriana Villela goes over how to use OTel with Hashicorp products like Nomad, Jessitron Kerr talks about using OTel to create heatmaps that are ASCII art as a teaching tool (or just for fun), and Rynn Mancuso & Reese Lee talk about OTel Unplugged. We'd love to hear your stories too - open mic. 11 AM PT, Friday Dec 16th. Add to calendar or RSVP on Meetup.
The End User Discussion Group is kicking off a third APAC friendly time - and trying something new, inviting maintainers to the groups. Ted Young attended the last two US ones and it was really helpful! Today's US one focused primarily on the new OTel metrics, but just like always they're open to any topics. Read more about the group here in Reese Lee's blog post.
Next EMEA group - Dec 20th, 10 am GMT
Next US group - Jan 19th, 9 am PT
Next APAC group - Jan 18th, 11 am IST
Want more frequent OpenTelemetry news? O11y.news has a weekly collection of links, curated by Michael Hausenblaus.
Stand up and be counted in this Open Telemetry User survey.
As always, hit reply if we can answer any questions for you about OTel. Signing off for 2022, this is Rynn Mancuso, OpenTelemetry End User WG maintainer & OpenTelemetry in Practice organizer.