Learning OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry is a revolution in observability data. Instead of running multiple uncoordinated pipelines, OpenTelemetry provides users with a single integrated stream of data, providing multiple sources of high-quality telemetry data: tracing, metrics, logs, RUM, eBPF, and more. This practical guide shows you how to set up, operate, and troubleshoot the OpenTelemetry observability system.

Authors Austin Parker, head of developer relations at Lightstep and OpenTelemetry Community Maintainer, and Ted Young, cofounder of the OpenTelemetry project, cover every OpenTelemetry component, as well as observability best practices for many popular cloud, platform, and data services such as Kubernetes and AWS Lambda. You’ll learn how OpenTelemetry enables OSS libraries and services to provide their own native instrumentation—a first in the industry.

Ideal for application developers, OSS maintainers, operators and infrastructure teams, and managers and team leaders, this book guides you through:

• The principles of modern observability
• All OpenTelemetry components—and how they fit together
• A practical approach to instrumenting platforms and applications
• Methods for installing, operating, and troubleshooting an OpenTelemetry-based observability solution
• Ways to roll out and maintain end-to-end observability across a large organization
• How to write and maintain consistent, high-quality instrumentation without a lot of work

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. The State of Modern Observability

Chapter 2. Why Use Open Telemetry?

Chapter 3. Open Telemetry Overview

Chapter 4. The Open Telemetry Architecture

Chapter 5. Instrumenting Applications

Chapter 6. Instrumenting Libraries

Chapter 7. Observing Infrastructure

Chapter 8. Designing Telemetry Pipelines

Chapter 9. Rolling Out Observability

Appendix A. The Open Telemetry Project

Appendix B. Further Resources

bout the Authors

Ted Young is one of the Co-Founders of the OpenTelemetry project. With twenty years of experience, he has built distributed systems in a variety of environments, including visual fx pipelines and container scheduling systems. He currently works as Director of Developer Education at Lightstep. He loves speaking to users, teaching OpenTelemetry, and sharing observability best practices.

Austin Parker is the Head of Developer Relations at Lightstep, and has been creating problems with computers for most of his life. He’s a maintainer of the OpenTelemetry project, the host of several podcasts, organizer of Deserted Island DevOps, infrequent Twitch streamer, conference speaker, and more. When he’s not working, you can find him posting on Twitter, cooking, and parenting. His most recent book is Distributed Tracing in Practice (O’Reilly).