Who is software for? It’s an interesting question, because there’s an obvious answer. It’s for the users, right? If your job is to write software, then it’s implied that the most important thing you should care about is the experience people have when they use your software.

OpenTelemetry can be used for generating and collecting telemetry signals like logs, metrics, and traces. The advantage of using OpenTelemetry for observability is that it is open-source and frees you from vendor lock-in. You can use OpenTelemetry for multiple use cases OpenTelemetry is an open-source project which has emerged as the standard for achieving comprehensive observability in modern applications.

On a recent thread on the CNCF Slack’s OTel Collector channel, a user asked a question that shone a light on a topic I don't think has been effectively discussed elsewhere.

Distributed transaction tracing (DTT) is a way of following the progress of message requests as they permeate through distributed cloud environments. Tracing the transactions as they make their way through many different layers of the application stack, such as from Kafka to ActiveMQ to MQ or any similar platform, is achieved by tagging the message request with a unique identifier that allows it to be followed.

Are you looking for an OpenTelemetry alternative? Then you've come to the right place. There are no good alternatives to OpenTelemetry if your use case involves generating different types of telemetry signals like logs, metrics, and traces and their collection. In certain use cases, like monitoring only metrics or time-series data, you can use a tool like Prometheus. If you’re sure you want an OpenTelemetry alternative, then let me point you to these three here.

AWS’s serverless technologies are popular because they provide cost effective scaling and great separation of concerns. However, observing serverless architectures like Lambda is challenging due to their transient nature and abstracted infrastructure. Unlike traditional systems with consistent hosts, serverless functions are ephemeral, often scaling rapidly and operating in isolation.

In the previous article I covered how to set up auto-instrumented tracing for a Node.js app using OpenTelemetry (OTEL). We then sent the spans directly to the open source tracing tool Jaeger. I recommend you give that a read first before walking through this guide because we're going to re-use the instrumentation we set up last time. Today we're going to take things a step further by introducing the OpenTelemetry Collector.