Fundamentals of Observability with OpenTelemetry

The systems of today are exponentially more complex than the systems of 15, or even 10 years ago. There are way more moving parts and interactions to keep track of, sometimes leading to systems behaving in very unpredictable ways. In the past, Software Engineers and Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) could rely on logging and monitoring to make sense of their systems. This is no longer the case. The good news is that Observability can help.

In this course, you will learn about how Observability can help SREs and Software Engineers make sense of what’s going on in their systems. You will also learn about OpenTelemetry: what it is, how it supports Observability goals, how OpenTelemetry instrumentation works, and how the OpenTelemetry Collector and OpenTelemetry Operator further enhance OpenTelemetry’s capabilities. You will put OpenTelemetry theory into practice with hands-on exercises which include instrumenting a Python application with OpenTelemetry, configuring the OpenTelemetry Collector, and deploying and configuring the OpenTelemetry Kubernetes Operator. Finally, you will learn what pitfalls to avoid when setting up an Observability practice, to ensure that you and your teams are positioned for success, and explore some advanced Observability use cases supported by OpenTelemetry.

What you’ll learn and how you can apply it

• Understand what Observability is, and why it is an important practice for SREs and software engineers
• Understand how OpenTelemetry helps to achieve Observability, and understand the basic building blocks required to instrument an application
• Understand the value of the OpenTelemetry Collector, and how to configure and deploy it
• Understand the value of the OpenTelemetry Operator, and how to configure and deploy it
• Quickly see OpenTelemetry in action in a complex ecosystem by running the OpenTelemetry Demo App
• Use OpenTelemetry to instrument a simple Python application and send traces to an Observability back-end via the OpenTelemetry Collector
• Understand what pitfalls to avoid in order to run a successful Observability practice
• Understand additional ways in which OpenTelemetry can help achieve Observability

This course is for you because…

• You're a Site Reliability Engineer looking to improve the reliability of your systems.
• You're a Software Engineer looking to improve the debuggability of your code.

Prerequisites:

• Familiarity with Linux
• Working knowledge of Python programming
• Docker fundamentals
• Git fundamentals
• Kubernetes fundamentals, including deploying applications to Kubernetes