The latest News and Information on Observabilty for complex systems and related technologies.
Getting existing telemetry into Honeycomb just got easier! With the release of the Datadog APM Receiver, you can send your Datadog traces to the OpenTelemetry Collector, and from there, to any OpenTelemetry-compatible endpoint. Often, evaluating a new tracing solution requires re-instrumenting your applications from the ground up in a new vendor’s tooling. It’s a pretty high bar to clear just to see if a solution is worth adopting.
There are many computing resources used in different cloud application services to provide online software-as-a-service (SaaS). SaaS differs from traditional applications in that it works from a cloud computing environment. This means that both the application service as well as user data are being hosted by a cloud provider in the cloud. Therefore, the SaaS and data are accessible from anywhere as long as there's online access. This model provides a distinct advantage from a software perspective.
Network topology can get very complicated in the cloud, especially when you’re sending data to external SaaS providers. You will likely need to configure gateways and firewalls and keep close tabs on those points of egress. However, if your infrastructure exists within AWS, there’s a much simpler way and that’s through an AWS PrivateLink endpoint.
When you want to direct your observability data in a uniform fashion, you want to run an OpenTelemetry collector. If you have a Kubernetes cluster handy, that’s a useful place to run it. Helm is a quick way to get it running in Kubernetes; it encapsulates all the YAML object definitions that you need. OpenTelemetry publishes a Helm chart for the collector. When you install the OpenTelemetry collector with Helm, you’ll give it some configuration.
Today, I’d like to share with you a new community-contributed integration that helps you optimize and debug your Gradle builds. This new Gradle plugin is available today, is free to use, and you can use it immediately with a free Honeycomb account.
Open source monitoring and observability tools can be found in production all over the world – whether they’re being used by startups or entire enterprise development teams. DevOps, ITOps, and other technical teams rely on tools like Prometheus, Grafana, OpenSearch, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, Nagios, Zabbix, Graphite, InfluxDB, and others to monitor and troubleshoot their cloud environment.
One of my initial surprises upon joining Catchpoint about five months ago was to do with how much confusion there is in the observability market. Every single vendor has almost the same message around ensuring a great digital experience for your customers or employees or both. Of course, these experiences are critical to get right, but for the most part many of these solutions, at best, help to ensure that sites are live and available, and that they are reachable by some users.
