Distributed tracing is becoming a critical component of any application's performance monitoring stack. However, setting it up in-house is an arduous task, and that's why many companies prefer outside tools. Jaeger and Zipkin are two popular open-source projects used for end-to-end distributed tracing. Let us explore their key differences in this article.

It’s a bold claim for me to say that every developer can benefit from something 40% of them haven’t heard of, but hear me out. I was among the 40% who didn’t know tracing existed until this summer. Still, I spent the last three months learning why it’s critical to a developer’s workflow and the different ways developers pragmatically use it. In this blog, I hope to show you that you can benefit from tracing regardless of your stack, role, size, or project.

OpenTelemetry can auto-instrument your Java Spring Boot application to capture telemetry data from a number of popular libraries and frameworks that your application might be using. It can be used to collect logs, metrics, and traces from your Spring Boot application. In this tutorial, we will integrate OpenTelemetry with a Spring Boot application for traces and logs. Before the demo begins, let's have a brief overview of OpenTelemetry.

Tracing follows requests as they move through an entire network, from the initial client request to the final response. In financial services, end-to-end tracing is essential for maintaining robust security, ensuring comprehensive observability of system operations, and understanding chains of events in case of issues or anomalies.

Fleet management is a derivative term. Originally used in the automotive industry, it’s now used in a span of domains. It’s being used in data telemetry since the introduction of OpAmp, which is a part of the Open Telemetry project. Now, fleet management has broader implications. It simplifies telemetry data collection by automating agent deployment, and configuration, and providing insights into the real-time health and performance of your sprawling agent infrastructure.

This article compares OpenTelemetry and traditional APM tools with their strengths, weaknesses, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right solution for your application performance monitoring needs.

If you’re already familiar with distributed tracing, you know that spans are the building blocks of traces. But are you sleeping on what span events can do for you? First, you may need a wake-up call as to what a span event even is. While spans represent units of work or operation within a trace, a span event is a unique point in time during the span’s duration.