Practical OpenTelemetry

Learn the value that OpenTelemetry can bring to organizations that aim to implement observability best practices, and gain a deeper understanding of how different building blocks interact with each other to bring out-of-the-box, vendor-neutral instrumentation to your stack. With examples in Java, this book shows how to use OpenTelemetry APIs and configure plugins and SDKs to instrument services and produce valuable telemetry data. You’ll learn how to maximize adoption of OpenTelemetry and encourage the change needed in debugging workflows to reduce cognitive load for engineers troubleshooting production workloads.

Adopting observability best practices across an organization is challenging. This book begins with a discussion of how operational monitoring processes widely followed for decades fall short at providing the insights needed for debugging cloud-native, distributed systems in production. The book goes on to show how the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s OpenTelemetry project helps you standardize instrumentation and transport of telemetry signals, providing a common language for all observability tooling.

You Will Learn

Why observability is a necessity in modern distributed systems
The value of OpenTelemetry for engineers and organizations 
OpenTelemetry component specification and general design
Tracing, metrics, and logs APIs and SDKs, with examples in Java
OpenTelemetry Collectors and recommended transport and processing pipelines
How to adopt observability standards across an organization


Who This Book Is For
Software engineers familiar with cloud-native technologies and operational monitoring who want  to instrument and export telemetry data from their services; observability leads who want to roll out OpenTelemetry standards and bestpractices across their organizations; and Java developers who want a book with OpenTelemetry examples in that language