Observability and log management are needed for a strong IT strategy. Two essential tools for these purposes are AWS CloudWatch and OpenTelemetry. AWS Cloudwatch provides real-time data and insights into AWS-powered applications' health, performance, and efficiency. On the other hand, OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework that assists developers in creating, gathering, and exporting telemetry data (such as traces, metrics, and logs) for analysis.

Telemetry data collection and analysis are important for businesses. We're diving right in to explain the ins and outs of the OpenTelemetry Collector, including its core components, distribution selection, and customization tips for optimal data collection and integration. Whether you're new to OpenTelemetry or expanding your capabilities, this will help you effectively use the OpenTelemetry Collector in your observability strategy.

With observIQ’s contributions to OpenTelemetry, you can now use free, open-source tools to easily aggregate data across your entire infrastructure to any or multiple analysis tools. The easiest way to use the latest OpenTelemetry tools is with observIQ’s distribution of the OpenTelemetry collector. You can find it here. In this blog, we cover how to use OpenTelemetry to monitor SNMP.

Today's environments often present the challenge of collecting data from various sources, such as multi-cloud, hybrid on-premises/cloud, or both. Each cloud provider has its own tools that send data to their respective telemetry platforms. OpenTelemetry can monitor cloud VMs, on-premises VMs, and bare metal systems and send all data to a unified monitoring platform. This applies across multiple operating systems and vendors.

observIQ provides a unified telemetry platform using open standards and a powerful agent to collect, enrich, and transmit data. Built on an open-source framework, OpenTelemetry, it focuses on log management, metrics, and traces for modern observability at scale.

When sending data to Google Cloud, like logs, metrics, or traces, it can be beneficial to split the data up across multiple projects. This division may be necessary since each team has its own project, a central project is used for security audit logs, or for any other reason that your organization has. BindPlane has effective tools to manage this process. In this walkthrough, we will add fields to telemetry entries, allowing us to associate entries with a specific project and properly route them.

Before we start, I have a confession: I absolutely love Digg (people are still Digging things, right?) errr...Reddit. It actually is my front page to the internet, where I research upgrades for my home lab/VR/other niche hobbies, watch silly videos, ingest low-effort memes, judge if people are ‘AHs’ or not on /r/amitheasshole, and occasionally talk trash to other Redditors about my Michigan-based sports teams.

While OpenTelemetry (OTel) supports a wide variety of data sources and is constantly evolving to add more, there are still many data sources for which no receiver exists. Thankfully, OTel contains receivers that accept raw data over a TCP or UDP connection. This blog unveils how to leverage Linux Command Line Interface (CLI) tools, creating efficient data pipelines for ingestion through OTel's TCP receiver.

According to Statistia, the total number of data breaches reached an all-time high of 3,205 in 2023, affecting more than 350 million individuals worldwide. These breaches primarily occurred in the Healthcare, Financial Services, Manufacturing, Professional Services, and Technology sectors. The mishandling of sensitive log data provides an on-ramp to many of the most common attack vectors.

Turning logs into metrics isn’t a new concept. A version of this functionality is implemented in most agents, visualization tools, and backends. It’s everywhere because converting logs to metrics has many practical applications and is one of the fundamental mechanisms for controlling log volume in a telemetry pipeline. In this post, I’ll briefly overview log-based metrics, explain why they matter, and provide examples of how to build them using OpenTelemetry and BindPlane OP.