OpenTelemetry in Practice - Issue #4
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.
Recent Developments in Observability
OTLP 1.0 is official!
The OpenTelemetry Line Protocol released V1 this month! This should provide the stability needed to push those last vendor holdouts to move to accept the OTLP formatted data directly.
Deaf & HoH working group
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (the host of key observability projects like OpenTelemetry & Prometheus) recently launched a working group through the Contributor Strategy TAG on the inclusion of Deaf & hard of hearing people in cloud native. They are looking for participation from Deaf & hard of hearing technologists at every level of their career from student to senior engineer, and from interested allies. Learn more and participate!
Tracing in Kubernetes
Kubernetes is important and sometimes mysterious. Could tracing reveal its inner workings, and help Jess make sense of it?
Gartner Declares What is Observability
If you follow anything or anyone in the Observability space, you’ll know that the Gartner Magic Quadrant For APM and Observability 2023 was published this month. Martin has opinions.
Book Review: Modern Distributed Tracing in .NET
Martin reviews Liudmila Molkova's book on distributed tracing, calling it a must-have if you’re trying to make your applications more understandable in production.
Where are my traces? Troubleshooting traces in OpenTelemetry
When traces don't show up, there are so many possible reasons! Jessitron ran into a new one the other day, so she wrote it up.
Everyone knows that Martin Thwaites hates logs, but it seems that they are useful after all, for debugging why our tracing isn't working. He wrote a post about configuring OpenTelemetry to expose configuration errors through logging, well worth a read if you're using OpenTelemetry in .NET.
Ask Miss O11y
“Should my engineers care about how I set up sampling of our telemetry data?”
This question comes from a platform engineer who owns the observability pipeline, working with any number of application engineers who change code that sends useful data to this pipeline.
This is an exceptionally good question, and the short answer is: “yes, but not all of it” as they should understand the high-level decisions, but not the underlying implementations. Let’s dive into a few things ... Read More
Who else is into this? Upcoming OpenTelemetry Events
Speaking of Martin hating logs: coming up on 10th August, Martin will be talking to the CTO of MassDriver Dave Williams about why they both think logs are a waste of time, what's better, and how focusing on tracing helped with problems like alert fatigue. If you like hot takes, this is definitely one for you!
Coming up next week! It's DevOpsDays Chicago on 9-10 August. Jessitron is speaking about OpenTelemetry.
And if you can't make Chicago, maybe catch her giving the keynote at DevOpsDays Buffalo on 27 September!
And if you're interested in submitting a speaking proposal on observability, you have until August 6 to submit for Observability Day. We'd love to hear from you!
Want more info? Other people talking about Observability
Over on the OpenTelemetry in Focus, Austin Parker writes a monthly update on all the new OTEL features and releases.
Michael Hausenblas puts out an O11y newsletter here.
And Michael also has the OpenTelemetry in Use podcast! This ad-free, monthly show is about OpenTelemetry in the wild.
Andrew Dote recently blogged about Observability Driven CI. The post includes shell script command line for tracing- interesting stuff.
As always, hit reply if Miss O11y can answer any questions for you about OTel, or if you have some news for next month's edition.