Learning OpenTelemetry

Chapter 1. The State of Modern Observability

History is not the past but a map of the past, drawn from a particular point of view, to be useful to the modern traveler.

Henry Glassie, US historian¹

This is a book about the difficult problems inherent to large-scale distributed computer systems, and about how to apply OpenTelemetry to help solve those problems.

Modern software engineering is obsessed with end-user experience, and end users demand blazing-fast performance. Surveys show that users will abandon ecommerce sites that take more than two seconds to load. You’ve probably spent a fair amount of time trying to optimize and debug application performance issues, and if you’re like us, you’ve been frustrated by how inelegant and inefficient this process can be. There’s either not enough data or too much of it, and what data there is can be riddled with inconsistencies or unclear measurements.

Engineers are also faced with stringent uptime requirements. That means identifying and mitigating any issues before they cause a meltdown, not just waiting for the system to fail. And it means moving quickly from triage to mitigation. To do that, you need data.

But you don’t need just any data; you need correlated data—data that is already organized, ready to be analyzed by a computer system. As you will see, data with that level of organization has not been readily available. In fact, as systems have scaled and become more heterogeneous, finding the data you need to analyze an issue ...