Learning OpenTelemetry

Chapter 4. The OpenTelemetry Architecture

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

Brian W. Kernighan and P. J. Plauger¹

OpenTelemetry consists of three kinds of components: instrumentation installed within applications, exporters for infrastructure such as Kubernetes, and pipeline components for sending all of this telemetry to a storage system. You can see how these components connect in Figure 4-1.

This chapter gives you a high-level overview of all the components that make up OpenTelemetry. After that, we’ll dive into the OpenTelemetry Demo application to see how the components fit together.

Application Telemetry

The most important source of telemetry is applications. This means that OpenTelemetry must be installed in every application for it to work properly. Regardless of whether you install it automatically by using an agent or manually by writing code, the components you’ll install are the same. Figure 4-2 shows how they fit together.

Figure 4-1. The relationship between OpenTelemetry and analysis components

Figure 4-2. OpenTelemetry application architecture

Library Instrumentation

The most critical telemetry comes from OSS libraries ...