Modern digital organizations have rapidly adopted microservices-based architecture for their applications. Distributed tracing tools help monitor microservices-based applications. Choosing the right distributed tracing tool is critical. How do you know which is the right one for you? In this post, we will cover the top 13 distributed tracing tools in 2024 that can solve your monitoring and observability needs.

OpenTelemetry is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation(CNCF) incubating project aimed at standardizing the way we instrument applications for generating telemetry data(logs, metrics, and traces). However, OpenTelemetry does not provide storage and visualization for the collected telemetry data. And that’s where an OpenTelemetry backend is needed. Cloud computing and containerization made deploying and scaling applications easier.

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is an open-source framework designed to standardize and automate telemetry data collection, enabling you to collect, process, and distribute telemetry data from your system across vendors. Telemetry data is traditionally in disparate formats, and OTel serves as a universal standard to support data management and portability.

Modern-day software systems emit millions of log lines per minute. Cloud computing and containerization have made it easy to have distributed systems. Distributed systems emit logs from multiple sources. While developers have always used logs to debug stand-alone applications, centralized logging solves the challenges of modern-day distributed software systems.

We are delighted to announce the alpha release of the Elastic OpenTelemetry Distribution for Node.js. This distribution is a light wrapper around the OpenTelemetry Node.js SDK that makes it easier to get started using OpenTelemetry to observe your Node.js applications.

Welcome to SigNal 36, the 36th edition of our monthly product newsletter! We crossed 10 Million Docker downloads for our open source project. We’ve enhanced our Dashboards UX and incorporated feedback from users in different areas of our product. Let’s see what humans of SigNoz were up to in the month of April 2024.

When OpenTelemetry first came into the picture with the merger of OpenCensus and OpenTracing in 2019, it was pretty much all about classic telemetry data, namely- logs, metrics, and traces. Since then, OpenTelemetry has become an indispensable tool in the modern observability landscape. With frequent integrations and introduction to new capabilities every year or so, it has poised itself as an invaluable tool for cloud enterprises.

Both Grafana Tempo and Jaeger are tools aimed at distributed tracing for microservice architecture. Jaeger was released as an open-source project by Uber in 2015, while Tempo is a newer product announced in October 2020. Jaeger is a popular open-source tool that graduated as a project from Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Grafana Tempo is a high-volume distributed tracing tool deeply integrated with other open-source tools like Prometheus and Loki.

We’re excited to bring you relational fields, a new feature that allows you to query spans based on their relationship to each other within a trace. Previously, queries considered spans in isolation: You could ask about field values on spans and aggregate them based on matching criteria, but you couldn’t use any qualifying relationships about where and how the spans appear in a trace.