Learning OpenTelemetry: Setting Up and Operating a Modern Observability System

by Ted Young, Austin Parker

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 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

The principles of modern observabilityAll OpenTelemetry components—and how they fit togetherA practical approach to instrumenting platforms and applicationsMethods for installing, operating, and troubleshooting an OpenTelemetry-based observability solutionWays to roll out and maintain end-to-end observability across a large organizationHow to write and maintain consistent, high-quality instrumentation without a lot of work

Genres: Software, Technology

271 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 6, 2024

Reviews

[Eugene ghaiklor Obrezkov · Rating 2 out of 5]

While reading this book I couldn’t ignore the feeling that I’m reading just a documentation for OpenTelemetry from their official documentation. No insights, some of the things are WIP, definitely doesn’t worth the price.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Practitioner's Guide to Wide Events. tweet. tweet. video. tweet.

flamegraphs.

video.

System Jitter and Where to Find It: A Whack-a-Mole Experience. tweet.

b3 propagation.

CloudWatch Application Signals for Lambda.

[Rasmus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book, even with applied knowledge in the area.
It gives a great overview of what was before, what it is, why it's better, and different high-level ways to use it. It refers to a large implementation to see it in action on your own machine, and to draw inspiration from as well, but the book itself contains very few code snippets.

[Hou · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book clearly leaves the reader wanting more. It largely rehashes content already available in the OpenTelemetry documentation, offering little real added value or deeper insight.