Earlier, applications were mostly monolithic, meaning that several programs were written in the same language and placed in the same web stack. However, it is no longer the case today. Today, every software is comprised of several small application programs coming together each providing a service of its own. These applications are what we call microservices.

Observability is the process of understanding complex systems by analyzing their outcomes and enhancing those outcomes by monitoring events within the system. Today, observability is essential for IT services to achieve a better user experience and optimize software performance. With cloud platforms dominating the IT services landscape, organizations are inclined to deploy their software and hardware systems in the cloud to reduce operational costs and enhance flexibility.

With applications becoming increasingly distributed and complex, gaining insights into their behavior and performance is essential for maintaining reliability and delivering exceptional user experiences. OpenTelemetry has emerged as a powerful framework for instrumenting applications to collect, process, and export telemetry data.

NestJS is a popular and powerful open-source framework for building scalable and maintainable server-side applications with Node.js. It was developed by Kamil Myśliwiec and first released in 2017. NestJS is inspired by Angular, which brings familiarity and a structured approach to building back-end applications.

Linux is a powerful and widely-used operating system used by individuals, businesses, and organizations around the world. With its open-source nature and customizable features, Linux has become a popular choice for those seeking a reliable and efficient system for their computing needs. However, with this power and flexibility also comes the need for proper monitoring and management.

Imagine you are driving a car with no dashboard. You can't see the speed, fuel level, or engine temperature. You are flying blind, hoping everything is okay until something goes wrong. This is what it's like to manage complex IT systems without observability. Observability is the key to understanding the internal state of a system. It is crucial for detecting and resolving issues efficiently, reducing downtime and costs.

You might have heard of MTTR or MTBF. They are all important factors that make up incident management. Incident management refers to all the managerial processes behind bringing a site back to its uptime when it suddenly encounters any unplanned fault. And that is precisely why managing them is important. We must keep our site up-to-date so that downtimes are reduced, and customers can access any information with the least wait time.

Imagine you're leading a team of engineers responsible for monitoring and optimizing the performance of a cloud-based application used by millions of users worldwide. As the application continues to scale, you recognize the pressing need for a robust observability solution to learn about its distributed architecture. In this scenario, you're faced with an essential decision: choosing between OpenTelemetry and Datadog for distributed tracing and observability.

What do we gain when we integrate OpenTelemetry with FastAPI? Integrating OpenTelemetry with FastAPI offers many benefits that greatly improve the observability and monitoring capabilities of applications built on this high-performance web framework. By integrating OpenTelemetry's instrumentation capabilities into FastAPI projects, you can understand your applications' inner workings, enabling them to monitor, analyze, and optimize performance.

Why do we go for server health checkups? Well, think of it like this: just as we schedule regular checkups for ourselves to make sure we're healthy and functioning optimally, our servers need the same level of care. After all, they're the backbone of our digital infrastructure, tirelessly handling requests, serving data, and keeping our applications running smoothly.