Back in October, we announced the Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector Distribution, which offered the industry’s first production-ready support for OpenTelemetry. This distribution is the recommended way that customers of Splunk’s award-winning observability products capture metrics and traces.

System traceability is one of the three pillars of observability stack. The basic concept of observability is of operations, which include logging, tracing, and displaying metrics. Tracing is intuitively useful. Identify specific points in an application, proxy, framework, library, runtime, middleware, and anything else in the path of a request that represents the following of either ‘forks’ in execution flow and/or a hop or a fan out across network or process boundaries.

Most people are instrumenting their applications, with logs being an easy first step into the observability world, followed by metrics. Tracing lags behind these two and is maybe a little less used than other observability patterns. We hope to change that.

In order to continuously improve your Ruby application, you need to understand everything your code touches. That means visibility into how your frontend responds to the database queries that are central to your Ruby application. Sentry’s new Ruby SDK collects and monitors the data surrounding your traces, logs, and key metrics. With it, you now have the context to connect backend issues to frontend performance.

Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started observing metrics, logs, traces, and dashboards. When we say “easiest,” we mean it: Grafana Cloud is designed so that even novice observability users can use it. As a new user, you are not required to dive into the complexity of setting up Prometheus and figuring out how to create Grafana dashboards from scratch. Integrations are the reason why.

Open source has come a long way. One of my favorite reports on the subject is Red Hat’s State of Enterprise Open Source. For 2020, 95% of respondents said that open source is strategically important to their business needs. Here, I will be recapping my recent Illuminate presentation about embracing open source data collection and I thought it’s important to first talk about how open source has changed.

Oftentimes users of open source are told to go download it and figure it out… or pay for a managed solution in the cloud. So the typical choice is free and do-it-yourself or expensive and easy. With our new changes to Grafana Cloud, we are making it both free and easy to have a real, composable observability solution.