Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

I had the opportunity to present with Michael Fratto, Senior Research Analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence, at a virtual event hosted by Redmond. We discussed how telemetry pipelines are critical in controlling telemetry data (logs, metrics, events, and traces). Mike shared excellent insights from his recent research survey that discussed the proliferation of observability tools in enterprises and the challenges organizations face in managing those tools. ‍

When deploying a Node.js function in the cloud, you might initially think of traditional methods involving web servers and other infrastructure. However, if your application suddenly faces a surge in traffic—thousands or even millions of requests—it could crash if it's unable to handle the load. This is where AWS Lambda shines. AWS Lambda allows developers to run code without provisioning or managing servers.

Let’s imagine a scenario: you use OpenTelemetry, and your observability backend runs on several hosts. You collect data on application latency, and notice a recent increase that you want to investigate. But how will you know which host caused the degradation? This is exactly where OpenTelmetry resources come in. In the context of OpenTelemetry, a resource represents the entity producing the telemetry data, such as a container, host, process, service, or operating system.

We are excited to announce an expansion of our partnership with Embrace to bring mobile observability to our users using open standards like OpenTelemetry. We first worked with Embrace last year when they created a plugin for Grafana that gives mobile teams an easy way to visualize and analyze real-time mobile metrics directly in a Grafana dashboard.

OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework designed to capture distributed traces and metrics from applications and services. It provides a standardized way to collect, process, and export telemetry data to various backends like tracing systems, monitoring platforms, and logging tools. OpenTelemetry, currently an incubating project at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, is the merger of two popular observability projects: OpenTracing and OpenCensus.

Modern digital organizations have rapidly adopted microservices-based architecture for their applications. Microservices-based apps have components designed around business capabilities serving a specific purpose. It enables smaller engineering teams to own specific services that lead to increased productivity. But componentization also leads to complexity. Today’s modern internet-scale businesses have hundreds or thousands of microservices.

OpenTelemetry (OTel) Metrics are part of the OpenTelemetry project, which provides tools, APIs, and SDKs for telemetry data collection. These metrics capture system performance data like request latency, error rates, resource usage, and throughput. OTel aims to standardize observability across languages and platforms, making it easier to use and integrate telemetry data. Metrics are one of three core signals of OpenTelemetry along with logs and traces.