What is OpenTelemetry?

In this episode, we're talking all about OpenTelemetry. Also, Allen lays down some knowledge, Joe plays director and Outlaw stumps the chumps.

See the full show notes at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode216

News

• Thanks for the reviews Lanjunnn and scott339!
• Allen made the video on generating a baseball lineup application just by chatting with ChatGPT (youtube)

https://youtu.be/i6jSeLvoFmM

Allen made the video on generating a baseball lineup application just by chatting with ChatGPT

What is OpenTelemetry?

• An incubating project on the CNCF - Cloud Native Computing Foundation (cncf.io)
• What does incubating mean?
  • Projects used in production by a small number of users with a good pool of contributors
    • Basically you shouldn't be left out to dry here
• So what is Open Telemetry? A collection of APIs, SDKs and Tools that's used to instrument, generate, collect and export telemetry data
  • This helps you analyze your software's performance and behavior
• It's available across multiple languages and frameworks

It's all about Observability

• Understanding a system "from the outside"
  • Doesn't require you to understand the inner workings of the system
• The goal is to be able to troubleshoot difficult problems and answer the "Why is this happening?" Question
• To answer those questions, the application must be properly "Instrumented"
• This means the application must emit signals like metrics, traces, and logs
• The application is properly instrumented when you can completely troubleshoot an issue with the instrumentation available
• That is the job of OpenTelemetry - to be the mechanism to instrument applications so they become observable
• List of vendors that support OpenTelemetry: https://opentelemetry