With the rise of cloud computing, containerization, and microservices architecture, developers are adopting new approaches to building and deploying applications that are more scalable and resilient. Microservices architecture, in particular, has gained significant popularity due to its ability to break down monolithic applications into smaller, independent services.

A comprehensive guide to instrument Golang applications using OpenTelemetry libraries for metrics and traces.

Open Telemetry (OTel) is an open source observability framework that has garnered significant attention for its powerful capabilities in monitoring metrics, logs and traces.. It is second only to Kubernetes in the CNCF velocity chart with contributions being made from major players in the cloud industry, and has a growing community helping build out a thriving ecosystem.

What do good tests look like, and do you even need a Golang testing framework? We outline 6 Go testing frameworks and the best ways to leverage each.

Logging in Golang is an essential aspect of software development, as it helps developers monitor, troubleshoot, and analyze the behavior of their applications.

When it comes to monitoring Golang applications, there are various tools and practices you can use to gain insights into your application's performance, resource usage, and potential issues. By using OpenTelemetry for monitoring in your Go applications, you can gain valuable insights into the behavior, performance, and resource utilization of your distributed systems, allowing you to troubleshoot issues, optimize performance, and improve the overall reliability of your software.

gRPC (Google Remote Procedure Call) is a high-performance, open-source universal RPC framework that Google developed to achieve high-speed communication between microservices. gRPC has Protobuf (protocol buffers) by default which would format or serialize the messages to a specific format that will be highly packed, highly efficient data. By its virtue of being a lightweight RPC, gRPC is suited for many use-cases. gRPC can be considered a successor to RPC, which is light in weight.

In this article, we will implement distributed tracing for a Golang application with three microservices. To implement distributed tracing, we will be using open-source solutions - SigNoz and OpenTelemetry, so you can easily follow the tutorial.