OpenTelemetry is a collection of APIs, SDKs, and libraries that provide an open source observability framework for instrumenting, generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry data like metrics, traces, and logs. It is incubated under Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the same foundation which incubated Kubernetes. OpenTelemetry is quietly becoming the world standard for instrumenting cloud-native applications.

OpenTelemetry is a free and open-source software initiative with the objective of supplying software developers with the means to create distributed systems. OpenTelemetry was developed by engineers at Google, and developers have the ability to utilize it to create a standard foundation for the construction of distributed systems. The goal is to enable developers to write code once and then deploy it in any location of their choosing.

OpenTelemetry is a collection of tools and APIs for collecting, processing, and exporting telemetry data from software. It is used to instrument applications for performance monitoring, logging, tracking, tracing, and other observability purposes. What is Telemetry? The word is derived from the Greek “tele” meaning “remote,” and metron meaning “measure.” So, it’s the collection of metrics and their automatic to a receiver for monitoring.

The scenario: you want to see distributed traces, maybe for your web app. You’ve set up an OpenTelemetry collector to receive OTLP traces in JSON over HTTP, and send those to Honeycomb (how to do that is another post, and we’ll link it here when it’s up).

Over the last few years, Microsoft has built excellent tooling around different technologies. Today, everything is available and achievable through the Azure Portal, which helps manage complex solutions. However, this brings in challenges when it comes to managing the distributed resources. The struggle to keep track of messages or know the flow of messages through these distributed resources is growing day by day.

Cloud native and microservice architectures bring many advantages in terms of performance, scalability, and reliability, but one thing they can also bring is complexity. Having requests move between services can make debugging much more challenging and many of the past rules for monitoring applications don’t work well. This is made even more difficult by the fact that cloud services are inherently ephemeral, with containers constantly being spun up and spun down.

Today we’re excited to announce BindPlane OP – the first observability pipeline built for OpenTelemetry – is out of beta and now generally available. You can download the latest version here. Two months ago we released BindPlane OP in beta, and while we were confident we had something special, the response surpassed all of our expectations.

Systems and applications alike have become progressively distributed as microservices, open-source tools, and containerisation have gained traction. In order to actively monitor and respond quickly to issues that arise in our environment, distributed tracing has proven to be vital for businesses such as Uber, Postmates, Hello Fresh and TransferWise. It is, however, important to clarify what distributed tracing actually means.

SAP Hana monitoring support is now available in the open source OpenTelemetry collector. You can check out the OpenTelemetry repo here! You can utilize this receiver in conjunction with any OTel collector: including the OpenTelemetry Collector and observIQ’s distribution of the collector. Below are quick instructions for setting up observIQ’s OpenTelemetry distribution, and shipping SAP Hana telemetry to a popular backend: Google Cloud Ops.