Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Comprehensive observability starts with good instrumentation. OpenTelemetry, aka “OTel,” sets a unified standard, enabling you to instrument your applications once, then send that data to any backend observability tool of choice. OpenTelemetry’s standard for generating and ingesting telemetry data is slated to become as ubiquitous as current container orchestration standards. Because of this, development teams are increasingly adopting OpenTelemetry to their applications.

Distributed tracing helps you track requests across services and understand issues affecting your application performance. In distributed cloud architecture, debugging performance issues is complicated. Distributed tracing gives visibility to teams on how a user request performs across different services, protocols, and cloud infrastructure. Let’s start with a brief overview of distributed tracing.

OpenTelemetry is an open-source project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation(CNCF) that aims to standardize the generation and collection of telemetry data. The telemetry data helps developer, DevOps and IT teams to keep a check on their application health. The telemetry data collected by OpenTelemetry consist of logs, metrics, and traces. Together, they are used for performance monitoring and observability in distributed systems. At SigNoz, we are building an OpenTelemetry native APM.

OpenTelemetry is an open-source project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation(CNCF) that aims to standardize the generation and collection of telemetry data. The telemetry data helps developer, DevOps and IT teams to keep a check on their application health. The telemetry data collected by OpenTelemetry consist of logs, metrics, and traces. Together, they are used for performance monitoring and observability in distributed systems. At SigNoz, we are building an OpenTelemetry native APM.

Apache Kafka is a high-throughput, low-latency platform for handling real-time data feeds. Its storage layer is in essence a massively scalable pub/sub message queue designed as a distributed transaction log. It can be used to process streams of data in real-time, building up a commit log of changes. Kafka has strong ordering guarantees that enable it to handle all sorts of dataflow patterns including very low latency messaging and efficient multicast publish / subscribe.

In this post, we’ll look at how to host the OpenTelemetry Collector in Azure Container Apps. There are a few gotchas with how it’s deployed, so hopefully this will stop you from hitting the same issues. If you don’t care about the details and just want to run a script, I’ve created one here.

There are a few key differences between distributed tracing and OpenTelemetry. One is that OpenTelemetry offers a more unified approach to instrumentation, while distributed tracing takes a more granular approach. This means that OpenTelemetry can be less time-consuming to set up, but it doesn’t necessarily offer as much visibility into your system as distributed tracing does.