You might already know that OpenTelemetry is the future of instrumentation. It’s an open-source and vendor-neutral instrumentation framework that frees you from the trap of using proprietary libraries simply to understand how your code is behaving. Best of all, you can instrument your applications just once and then take that instrumentation to any other backend system of your choice. This blog shows you exactly how to use OpenTelemetry to ✨break the vendor lock-in cycle.✨

I have always found data collection to be a fascinating area of work at Sumo Logic. Collecting data is a critical first step for all the solutions we develop for our customers. After all, to observe the health and performance of your applications, you must first collect all relevant data. It's also an area that has seen some significant activities by the open-source community over the years, which is completely changing the landscape of observability as we know it.

OpenTelemetry is a vendor-neutral approach that enables DevOps and developers to collect performance metrics in a standardized manner. Currently a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) sandbox project, OpenTelemetry was conceived by merging OpenCensus, Google's open-source method of collecting metrics and traces, and OpenTracing, a vendor-neutral API to collect traces.

Modern software development is evolving rapidly, and while the latest innovations allow companies to grow through greater efficiency, there is a cost. Modern architectures are incredibly complex, which can make it challenging to diagnose and rectify performance issues. Once these issues affect customer experience, the consequences can be costly. So, what is the solution? Observability — which provides a visible overview of the big picture.

I’ve spent most of my career working with tech in various forms, and for the last ten years or so, I’ve focused a lot on building, maintaining, and operating robust, reliable systems. This has led me to put a lot of time into researching, evaluating, and implementing different solutions for automatic failure detection, monitoring, and more recently, observability. Before we get started: What is observability?

In this blog series, we are covering application instrumentation steps for distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry standards across multiple languages. Earlier, we covered Java Application Manual Instrumentation for Distributed Traces, Golang Application Instrumentation for Distributed Traces, and DotNet Application Instrumentation for Distributed Traces. Here we are going to cover the instrumentation for NodeJS.

We're excited to help our customers further leverage the benefits of OpenTelemetry via integration with AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) for traces 1.0.