We are excited to announce an expansion of our partnership with Embrace to bring mobile observability to our users using open standards like OpenTelemetry. We first worked with Embrace last year when they created a plugin for Grafana that gives mobile teams an easy way to visualize and analyze real-time mobile metrics directly in a Grafana dashboard.

OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework designed to capture distributed traces and metrics from applications and services. It provides a standardized way to collect, process, and export telemetry data to various backends like tracing systems, monitoring platforms, and logging tools. OpenTelemetry, currently an incubating project at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, is the merger of two popular observability projects: OpenTracing and OpenCensus.

Modern digital organizations have rapidly adopted microservices-based architecture for their applications. Microservices-based apps have components designed around business capabilities serving a specific purpose. It enables smaller engineering teams to own specific services that lead to increased productivity. But componentization also leads to complexity. Today’s modern internet-scale businesses have hundreds or thousands of microservices.

OpenTelemetry (OTel) Metrics are part of the OpenTelemetry project, which provides tools, APIs, and SDKs for telemetry data collection. These metrics capture system performance data like request latency, error rates, resource usage, and throughput. OTel aims to standardize observability across languages and platforms, making it easier to use and integrate telemetry data. Metrics are one of three core signals of OpenTelemetry along with logs and traces.

Working in the observability and monitoring space for the last few years, we have had multiple users complain about the lack of detailed monitoring for messaging queues and Kafka in particular. Especially with the coming of instrumentation standards like OpenTelemetry, we thought there must a better way to solve this. We dived deeper into the problem and were trying to understand what better can be done here to make understanding and remediating issues in messaging systems much easier.

Welcome to SigNal 37, the 37th edition of our monthly product newsletter! We crossed 17,000+ Github stars for our open source project. We’ve enhanced our Dashboards UX and incorporated feedback from users in different areas of our product. Let’s see what humans of SigNoz were up to in the month of May 2024.

Telemetry data sent from applications often contains Personally Identifying Information (PII) like names, user IDs, phone numbers, and other information that must be obfuscated before the data is sent to storage or observability tools, in order to be in compliance with corporate or government policies such as HIPAA in the US or the GDPR in the EU.

As a fan of OpenTelemetry, I love to see Cribl meeting customers where they are and helping them get to where they want to be with a vendor-agnostic approach. Where it is not possible or practical to re-instrument a telemetry source, whether an application or infrastructure, the barrier to adopting OpenTelemetry Signals can be daunting.