OpenTelemetry: A key piece of the monitoring puzzle
OpenTelemetry, an open source standard for collecting and analyzing telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces), is key to your monitoring and observability strategy.
Monitoring begins with capturing the data that’s crucial to seeing how your applications and infrastructure are performing at any given time. However that data is plentiful, difficult to store, and is often gathered from remote points within your IT ecosystem. It then has to be processed into something useful – allowing you to identify trends, root causes and other actionable insights to improve performance.
This is observability and it enables your organization to prepare for scenarios now and in the future, and prevent them from happening again.
So where does OpenTelemetry come in?
These are a few reasons why OpenTelemetry has been gaining traction. It provides an observability framework and standardizes the way telemetry data is collected and transmitted to backend platforms. Moreover, it bridges visibility gaps by providing a common format of instrumentation across all services.
OpenTelemetry is uniquely suitable for helping you to understand how certain observability data — logs, metrics, and traces — is collected and analyzed. It provides a common format for how observability data is collected and sent, via unified sets of vendor-agnostic libraries and APIs. This is crucial for observability.
Benefits of OpenTelemetry
The movement towards highly distributed microservice architectures has made OpenTelemetry popular for instrumenting applications that collect observability data. This means application developers can spend less time and effort building instrumentation tied to any one vendor or data collection technology and more time on building new features.
OpenTelemetry features:
• Collects telemetry data (traces, metrics, logs) from your services and software for use with a variety of analytics tools
• Drop-in instrumentation easily integrates with current libraries and frameworks
• Open source, vendor neutral, and provides a standard for adding observable instrumentation to applications that can be used by many vendors.
How does OpenTelemetry work?
OpenTelemetry is a specialized protocol for collecting telemetry data and exporting it to a target system. It provides a set of standardized vendor-agnostic SDKs, APIs, and tools for ingesting, transforming, and sending data to an observability back-end, whether open source or commercial vendor. OpenTelemetry collectors are also part of the mix. They offer a way to receive, process, and export telemetry data.
Although not technically required, collectors are an extremely useful component to the OpenTelemetry architecture because they allow greater flexibility for receiving and sending the application telemetry to one or more open-source or commercial back-ends.
How can you use OpenTelemetry with your existing monitoring tools?
ITRS offers an OpenTelemetry plugin with its Geneos 6.0 release, giving you the tools you need to supercharge your monitoring and observability game plan. It is particularly useful for financial services companies as they can standardize instrumentation with and open-source, vendor-neutral standard. Indeed, it is emerging as the de facto standard for instrumenting distributed traces, metrics and logs.
With ITRS’ new OpenTelemetry plugin for collecting metrics, logs, and traces, you have the keys to full-stack monitoring of your systems and applications for game-changing observability. What is your data telling you?
Learn more about Geneos and OpenTelemetry by watching our webinar below.
