In collaboration with F5, ServiceNow® Cloud Observability is pleased to announce the availability of the OpenTelemetry Arrow Project. This co-donated and co-developed project gives organizations greater control over the data extracted from their cloud applications—as well as a path forward to improve the return on investment (ROI) of that data.

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.

It was a rainy day in Seattle at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in December 2018 when I first encountered the term ‘OpenTelemetry.’ At that time, I was an active member of a working group focused on developing W3C Trace Context, a standard now extensively employed for context propagation in distributed systems.

In the fast-paced universe of software development, especially in the cloud-native realm, DevOps and SRE teams are increasingly emerging as essential partners in application stability and growth. DevOps engineers continuously optimize software delivery, while SRE teams act as the stewards of application reliability, scalability, and top-tier performance. The challenge?

In the fast-paced universe of software development, especially in the cloud-native realm, DevOps and SRE teams are increasingly emerging as essential partners in application stability and growth. DevOps engineers continuously optimize software delivery, while SRE teams act as the stewards of application reliability, scalability, and top-tier performance. The challenge?

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.

Microservices architecture has become increasingly popular in modern software development due to its scalability, resilience, and flexibility. However, with the benefits of microservices come the challenges of debugging and monitoring these distributed systems. Using the Istio service mesh, OpenTelemetry distributed tracing, and Apica’s Kubernetes-native observability platform, developers can easily collect and visualize performance data in real-time to identify and fix issues quickly.