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OpenTelemetry

Introduction

OpenTelemetry is an observability framework and toolkit designed to create and manage telemetry data, including traces, metrics, and logs. It is vendor- and tool-agnostic, allowing it to be used with various observability backends such as Jaeger and Prometheus, as well as commercial offerings. OpenTelemetry is a project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Major Components

OpenTelemetry consists of the following major components:

  • A specification that defines the components
  • A standard protocol for telemetry data
  • Semantic conventions for standard naming schemes
  • APIs for generating telemetry data
  • A library ecosystem that provides instrumentation for common libraries and frameworks
  • Automatic instrumentation components that generate telemetry data without code changes
  • Language SDKs that implement the specification, APIs, and telemetry data export
  • The OpenTelemetry Collector, a proxy for receiving, processing, and exporting telemetry data
  • Various other tools, such as the OpenTelemetry Operator for Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry Helm Charts, and community assets for FaaS

OpenTelemetry supports a wide range of ecosystem integrations.

The project is supported by 40+ vendors who provide commercial support and contribute directly to the project.

Extensibility

OpenTelemetry is designed to be extensible. Users can add custom receivers to the OpenTelemetry Collector, load custom instrumentation into an SDK, create tailored distributions of an SDK or the Collector, develop new exporters for custom backends, and create custom propagators for nonstandard context propagation formats.

Installing the OpenTelemetry Operator

helm repo add opentelemetry https://openTelemetry.github.io/opentelemetry-helm-charts
helm repo update
helm install opentelemetry-operator opentelemetry/opentelemetry-operator \
    --namespace observability --create-namespace
kubectl get pods -n observability

Setting Up Your First OpenTelemetry Collector

apiVersion: operator.openTelemetry.io/v1alpha1
kind: OpenTelemetryCollector
metadata:
  name: basic-otel-collector
  namespace: observability
spec:
  mode: deployment
  config: |
    receivers:
      otlp:
        protocols:
          grpc:
            endpoint: "0.0.0.0:55680"
    processors:
      batch:
    exporters:
      logging:
        logLevel: debug
    service:
      pipelines:
        traces:
          receivers: [otlp]
          processors: [batch]
          exporters: [logging]
  • Receivers: Configures the collector to receive data using the OTLP protocol.
  • Processors: Adds batching to improve telemetry efficiency.
  • Exporters: Sends the telemetry data to a logging endpoint for debugging.
  • Service Pipelines: Defines a pipeline for processing traces, connecting receivers to exporters.
kubectl apply -f collector-config.yaml

Reference

  • https://opentelemetry.io/
  • https://github.com/open-telemetry
  • https://www.datadoghq.com/knowledge-center/opentelemetry/
  • https://cloud.google.com/learn/what-is-opentelemetry
  • https://last9.io/blog/kubernetes-observability-with-opentelemetry-operator/
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