One of the qualities of engineering team excellence is thinking outside the box to find creative solutions to hard problems. It’s our responsibility, as dev leaders, to pass on to the next generations of developers tips and tricks to help them look beyond the surface to solve complex business problems and leverage the power of the open source community, when possible.

Insightful proof-of-concepts with a tool can be difficult to undertake due to the demands on valuable resources: time, energy, and people. With a task as grand as observability, how could one truly test if Honeycomb and OpenTelemetry are right for their organization and meet their requirements? For this thought experiment, here’s a comprehensive description of the ideal product evaluation over the course of four weeks, given unlimited resources.

Arguably, OpenTelemetry exists to (greatly) increase usage of tracing and metrics among developers. That said, logging will continue to play a critical role in providing flexible, application-specific, event-driven data. Further, OpenTelemetry has the potential to bring added value to existing application logging flows.

Modern applications are becoming increasingly distributed due to a wide range of benefits including enhanced scalability, high availability, fault tolerance, and better geographical distribution. But it also makes the overall system complex making it challenging to understand how they function internally. Distributed tracing helps to address it by tracking how requests flow through various system components with detailed insights.

Connect your metrics to your traces with exemplars to quickly troubleshoot and resolve latency issues.

Open source Zipkin offers a robust set of features that make it easier for developers to understand and optimize complex distributed systems. Distributed tracing is a technique you can use to trace and monitor requests propagating through a distributed system. It can work in environments where multiple services process a request, making it an essential tool for modern microservices architectures. Zipkin is an open source distributed tracing system for monitoring and troubleshooting complex systems.

OpenTelemetry (also abbreviated as OTEL) is an increasingly popular open-source observability platform under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which is currently the most active project in the CNCF after Kubernetes. It was created to establish a unified and vendor-agnostic way for instrumenting, collecting, and exporting telemetry data for your system and application across traces, logs, and metrics.