In a recent post we showed you how to get started with the free and open tier of Elastic Observability. Today we'll walk through what you need to do to expand your deployment so you can start gathering metrics from application performance monitoring (APM), or "tracing" data in your observability cluster, for free.

Daniel is a Site Reliability Engineer at k6.io. He’s especially interested in observability, distributed systems, and open source. During his free time, he helps maintain Grafana Tempo, an easy-to-use, high-scale distributed tracing backend. Distributed tracing is a way to track the path of requests through the application. It’s especially useful when you’re working on a microservice architecture.

For decades, application development and operations teams have struggled with the best way to generate, collect, and analyze telemetry data from systems and apps. In 2010, we discussed our approach to telemetry and tracing in the Dapper papers, which eventually spawned the open-source OpenCensus project, which merged with OpenTracing to become OpenTelemetry.

Datadog’s support of OpenTelemetry—a vendor-agnostic, open source set of APIs and libraries for collecting system and application telemetry data—has helped thousands of organizations implement monitoring strategies that complement their existing workflows. Many of our customers leverage OpenTelemetry for their server- and container-based deployments, but also need visibility into the health and performance of their serverless applications running on AWS Lambda.

Amazon Web Services has announced enhanced support for the open-source distribution of the OpenTelemetry project for its users. AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) now includes support for AWS Lambda layers for the most popular languages and additional partners integrated into the ADOT collector. And one of those partners is Logz.io! Logz.io is happy to announce that our exporter is now included in the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry.

Splunk Distro for OpenTelemetry is a secure, production-ready, Splunk-supported distribution of the OpenTelemetry project and provides multiple installable packages that automatically instruments your Java application to capture and report distributed traces to Splunk APM (no code changes required!), making it easy to get started with distributed tracing!

In our last blog, we introduced OpenTelemetry Python v1.0.0 and walked you through instrumenting a Python application and install both the OpenTelemetry API and SDK.

As an open source company, we understand the value of open standards and interoperability. This holds true for Grafana Cloud and our managed Tempo service for traces, which is currently in beta. The Grafana Agent makes it easy to send traces to Grafana Cloud, but it is not required. In fact, Grafana Cloud’s Tempo service is exposed as a standards-compliant gRPC endpoint that conforms to the Open Telemetry TraceService with HTTP Basic authorization.

Logz.io has pressed hard to align our tracing and metrics analytics capabilities over the past year. And as our technology advances, so does our service. We are announcing Multiple Tracing Accounts with Logz.io Distributed Tracing, aligning it with our logging and metrics tools. Complementing multiple data sources for metrics and logs, Logz users can segment their data according to sources and teams for better organization.