Eric D. Schabell: July 2024

Monday, July 29, 2024

A Hands-on Guide to OpenTelemetry - Visualizing Instrumentation for Developers using Jaeger


 Are you ready to start your journey on the road to collecting telemetry data from your applications? Great observability begins with great instrumentation! 

In this series you'll explore how to adopt OpenTelemetry (OTel) and how to instrument an application to collect tracing telemetry. You'll learn how to leverage out-of-the-box automatic instrumentation tools and understand when it's necessary to explore more advanced manual instrumentation for your applications. By the end of this series you'll have an understanding of how telemetry travels from your applications, to the OpenTelemetry Collector, and be ready to bring OpenTelemetry to your future projects. Everything discussed here is supported by a hands-on, self-paced workshop authored by Paige Cruz

The previous article we explored how to leverage programmatic instrumentation in our application as developers would in their daily coding using OTel libraries. In this article we carry onwards to improve the visualization of our telemetry data that was being displayed in console output. We are going to programmatically instrument and configure our application to direct all telemetry data to a Jaeger instance for visual insights.

Monday, July 22, 2024

A Hands-on Guide to OpenTelemetry - Programmatic Instrumentation for Developers

Are you ready to start your journey on the road to collecting telemetry data from your applications? Great observability begins with great instrumentation! 

In this series you'll explore how to adopt OpenTelemetry (OTel) and how to instrument an application to collect tracing telemetry. You'll learn how to leverage out-of-the-box automatic instrumentation tools and understand when it's necessary to explore more advanced manual instrumentation for your applications. By the end of this series you'll have an understanding of how telemetry travels from your applications, to the OpenTelemetry Collector, and be ready to bring OpenTelemetry to your future projects. Everything discussed here is supported by a hands-on, self-paced workshop authored by Paige Cruz

The previous article we explored how to gain better insights by adding manual instrumentation to our application leveraging the existing auto-instrumentation. In this article, we move on to programmatic instrumentation in our application as developers would in their daily coding. We'll be using OTel libraries and eventually visualize the collected telemetry data in Jaeger.

Monday, July 15, 2024

A Hands-on Guide to OpenTelemetry - Better Tracing with Automatic Instrumentation

 Are you ready to start your journey on the road to collecting telemetry data from your applications? Great observability begins with great instrumentation! 

In this series you'll explore how to adopt OpenTelemetry (OTel) and how to instrument an application to collect tracing telemetry. You'll learn how to leverage out-of-the-box automatic instrumentation tools and understand when it's necessary to explore more advanced manual instrumentation for your applications. By the end of this series you'll have an understanding of how telemetry travels from your applications, to the OpenTelemetry Collector, and be ready to bring OpenTelemetry to your future projects. Everything discussed here is supported by a hands-on, self-paced workshop authored by Paige Cruz

The previous article we took our first steps in generating telemetry data using automatic instrumentation. In this article, we explore how to gain better insights by adding manual instrumentation to our application leveraging the existing auto-instrumentation.

Monday, July 8, 2024

A Hands-on Guide to OpenTelemetry - Using Automatic Instrumentation

 Are you ready to start your journey on the road to collecting telemetry data from your applications? Great observability begins with great instrumentation! 

In this series you'll explore how to adopt OpenTelemetry (OTel) and how to instrument an application to collect tracing telemetry. You'll learn how to leverage out-of-the-box automatic instrumentation tools and understand when it's necessary to explore more advanced manual instrumentation for your applications. By the end of this series you'll have an understanding of how telemetry travels from your applications, to the OpenTelemetry Collector, and be ready to bring OpenTelemetry to your future projects. Everything discussed here is supported by a hands-on, self-paced workshop authored by Paige Cruz

The previous article introduced observability concepts and terms as related to OpenTelemetry and its components. In this article, we continue onwards with our first steps in generating telemetry data using automatic instrumentation.

Thursday, July 4, 2024

Tech Meetup Glasgow - Observability for You and Me with OpenTelemetry (slides)

I've been a guest to the Tech Meetup in Edinburgh a few times over the years and was recently asked to drop in on the meetup of the same name in Glasgow.

This meetup is a generalist event for everyone in the Glasgow tech community. It welcomes people with all levels of experience, even if you are starting your journey into tech as a student, boot camper, or you're thinking of starting your development career, you are more than welcome.

I'm going to be sharing an introduction to both cloud native observability and touch on tracing with OpenTelemetry on 4 July 2024. I'm the second talk of the evening but it all kicks off at 18:00.

Below you'll find the slides I used and the links to the workshop referenced at the end to provide attendees with a hands-on workshop to build out the demo discussed at the event.

Monday, July 1, 2024

A Hands-on Guide to OpenTelemetry - Intro to Observability

Are you ready to start your journey on the road to collecting telemetry data from your applications? Great observability begins with great instrumentation! 

In this series you'll explore how to adopt OpenTelemetry (OTel) and how to instrument an application to collect tracing telemetry. You'll learn how to leverage out-of-the-box automatic instrumentation tools and understand when it's necessary to explore more advanced manual instrumentation to your applications. By the end of this series you'll have an understanding of how telemetry travels from your applications, to the OpenTelemetry Collector, and be ready to bring OpenTelemetry to your future projects. Everything discussed here is supported by a hands-on, self-paced workshop authored by Paige Cruze

This first article takes time to lay the foundation, defining common observability and monitoring terms that help us gain an understanding of the role of OpenTelemetry and its components. There is more reading available for you on learning about the basics of OpenTelemetry.