Applications are increasingly switching from the traditional monolithic design to a modern microservices-based design with several operational benefits. However, it also introduces challenges as conventional methods for collecting metrics and logs become ineffective due to the application design’s distributed nature.

Nodejs is a popular Javascript runtime environment that executes Javascript code outside of a web browser. Express is the most popular web frameworks that sits on top of Nodejs and adds functionalities like middleware, routing, etc. to Nodejs. You can monitor your express application using OpenTelemetry and a tracing backend of your choice.

OpenTelemetry can auto-instrument many common modules for a Javascript application. The telemetry data captured can then be sent to SigNoz for analysis and visualization. OpenTelemetry is a set of tools, APIs, and SDKs used to instrument applications to create and manage telemetry data(Logs, metrics, and traces). For any distributed system based on microservice architecture, it's an operational challenge to solve performance issues quickly.

Well howdy there partner, Phillip here with a rootin’ tootin’ OTel update for ya, right on time for Kubecon EU!

Within enterprises, it used to be that applications ran on a single server. Owners could directly monitor that discrete machine, conveniently access all the logs they needed, see all the metrics that mattered, and hit the reboot button, without needing to confer with “everyone.” Those days are gone. Modern application architectures stretch the definitions of the words “federated” and “distributed.” We now have distributed applications.

At observIQ, we use the OTel collector to collect host/container-level metrics and logs from our systems. But to get more detailed monitoring of our applications (APM), we use the OTel SDK and instrumentation libraries. This post aims to provide a quick start to setting up tracing exporting to a local Jaeger instance.

The AWS CDK lets users build as Infrastructure as Code (IaC) reliable, scalable, and cost-effective applications in their cloud environments. With the AWS CDK, developers can use various supported programming languages to create constructs (reusable cloud components) and compose them together into stacks and applications.