This guest post is written by Ian Duncan, Staff Engineer - Stability Team at Mercury. To view the original post, go to Ian's website. At work, we use OpenTelemetry extensively to trace execution of our Haskell codebase. We struggled for several months with a mysterious tracing issue in our production environment wherein unrelated web requests were being linked together in the same trace, but we could never see the root trace span.
I’m launching a new Observability Series called the Observability Professor, and it is designed to cover some common topics and terms in a vendor agnostic way. That’s right, no marketing! So what’s special, what’s new, what’s it going to cover that everyone else in the industry missed? Background: There are endless amounts of blogs, papers, and books on Observability; what it is and what it offers.
The combination of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and OpsRamp is helping organizations to manage and transform their multi-vendor and multi-cloud IT estates with AI-driven operations, improving the performance and reliability of those environments while reducing complexity and technical debt.
Even as the global economy shows signs of a rebound, today’s observability customers are more focused than ever on driving utmost value from their investments. This isn’t simply because economics have forced organizations to closely review overhead and drive out unnecessary costs; the reality is that observability has become one of the leading budget items for every cloud software organization, full stop.
Frontend observability (or real user monitoring) is a critical, yet often overlooked, part of systems monitoring. Website and mobile app frontends are just as complex, if not more so, than the backend systems observability teams typically prioritize. They also represent the first interaction users have with our applications — so it’s important to have full visibility into that experience.
On the surface, business-critical IT infrastructure and cats may not seem like they have a lot in common. But they’re way more alike than you might think. Our feline friends contain multitudes, as any cat parent will tell you. They’re complex and can sometimes drive you up a wall. But once they warm up to you—and you warm up to them—the joys and benefits of having them in your life outweigh just about everything. Sounds a lot like technology, right?
To help simplify instrumenting Spring Boot applications with Grafana Cloud, we are excited to introduce the Grafana OpenTelemetry Starter, a project that connects the latest Micrometer enhancements from Spring Boot 3 with Grafana Cloud using OpenTelemetry. By using these tools, you will have logs, metrics, and traces in a single service — in the same easy way that you can use Prometheus with Spring Boot.
The OpenTelemetry Collector is a useful application to have in your stack. However, deploying it has always felt a little time consuming: working out how to host the config, building the deployments, etc. The good news is the OpenTelemetry team also produces Helm charts for the Collector, and I’ve started leveraging them. There are a few things to think about when using them though, so I thought I’d go through them here.
Observability and monitoring: These terms are often used interchangeably, but they represent different approaches to understanding and managing IT infrastructure. If you are new to these terms or are often confused between the two, this blog is for you! In this blog, we'll explore the key concepts of observability and monitoring, their evolution in IT operations, their differences and similarities, and their importance in modern infrastructure.
