Day Two Cloud 192: OpenTelemetry – Getting From Visibility To Observability With Ben Hall

OpenTelemetry is an open-source project that brings together tools, SDKs, and APIs for collecting telemetry–that is, logs, metrics, and traces—in a standardized way. The goal of the project is to help developers and operators instrument highly distributed applications and services to understand dependencies, monitor performance, and quickly troubleshoot problems. On today’s Day Two Cloud podcast we explore OpenTelemetry and how it works. We also discuss the difference between visibility and observability, and why this matters. Guest Ben Hall sees visibility as measuring something that’s happening (for example CPU or memory utilization on a host) while observability is understanding why something is happening. Ben is a Principal Software Engineer at Homes England. We discuss: * The origins of OpenTelemetry * OpenTelemetry’s key components * What information operators can learn from logs, metrics, and traces * Working with OpenTelemetry collectors * Industry support for OpenTelemetry * How to get started * More Takeaways: 1. OpenTelemetry offers a unified standard for observability, enabling developers to gain greater insight into their systems and troubleshoot issues more efficiently across tech stack boundaries. 2. The OpenTelemetry Collector is a versatile Swiss Army knife, really simplifying the transition to OpenTelemetry and enabling a gradual, seamless integration with existing and new monitoring and observability tools. 3. OpenTelemetry promotes a clear division of responsibilities between tracing and logging, allowing developers to focus on capturing the right information for each purpose. See it as training wheels – encouraging us to improve our logging practices, and reduce “log trash” to maintain more meaningful logs, while leveraging tracing for efficient transaction tracking and correlation. Show Links: OpenTelemetry.io @benhall_io – Ben Hall on Twitter Ben Hall on LinkedIn Failing Fast.io – Ben’s blog The Modern Observability Problem OpenTelemetry, The Missing Ingredient Transcript: [00:00:01.310] – Ethan Welcome to day two. Cloud. Today we got a good one for you today. We’re talking about the open source project, Open Telemetry, and this is going to be a I honestly think this is going to be a very big deal, very impactful for you if you’re in Cloud, the cloud native world, et cetera. Open telemetry is going to impact you one way or the other. Would you, would you agree, Ned? [00:00:20.380] – Ned Yeah, I always think of monitoring as super boring, but it turns out it’s kind of interesting and that’s why we ended up with such a robust episode with our guest today. [00:00:30.940] – Ethan Our guest is Ben Hall. He is a principal software engineer at Homes England and he’ll talk about that in just a moment. Enjoy this conversation with Ben Hall. Ben hall. Welcome to day two. Cloud. Sir. Thank you for making the time. And you’ve not been on the show before, so let’s introduce you to the audience. Tell the nice people listening who you are and what you do. [00:00:53.970] – Ben Yeah, as you said, my name is Ben Hall.