Part 1 OpenTelemetry

Opentelemetry: An Observability framework and toolkit designed to create and manage telemetry data such as traces, metrics, and logs.

I have intermediate programming experience in languages like Python and Go. I've worked on a couple of projects where the application generated logs to flat files or sent events to a remote syslog over TCP/UDP. Initially, I wondered why OpenTelemetry was necessary. However, it seems to offer much more than traditional logging for observability. One feature I find particularly helpful is its distributed tracing. In microservices, a single request often spans multiple services, and traditional logging alone struggles to track the flow of a request across these services—though it is possible with some customization.

With OpenTelemetry Traces, it seem to provide a way to track the entire lifecycle of a request, including which services it touched, how long each step took, and where errors occurred(can help to find hotspots in execution flow).

With Trace Context Propagation: OT automatically propagates trace context (e.g., trace IDs) across service boundaries, making it easy to correlate logs and traces.

I haven't used OpenTelemetry yet, but I'm just getting started today and I'm excited to explore its features.

This is especially useful for debugging performance issues or errors in distributed systems.