open-telemetry / opentelemetry-demo

Observability and Tracing for open-telemetry/opentelemetry-demo

Strategies and methods for observing and tracing the behavior of the demo application, including the use of OpenTelemetry’s tracing features.

What is Observability and Tracing?

Observability and tracing refer to the practices and tools used to monitor and understand the behavior and performance of complex, distributed systems. These practices help developers and operators gain insights into the internal workings of their applications and infrastructure, enabling them to quickly identify and resolve issues.

Why is Observability and Tracing important?

In today’s microservices-based architectures, applications often consist of multiple interconnected components that communicate with each other over a network. As a result, it can be challenging to understand the flow of requests and responses between these components, and to identify the root cause of performance issues or errors.

Observability and tracing provide a way to gain visibility into these complex systems, allowing developers to:

  • Understand the performance characteristics of their applications and infrastructure
  • Identify and diagnose issues quickly and effectively
  • Monitor the health and availability of their systems in real-time
  • Improve the overall user experience by optimizing application performance

OpenTelemetry for Observability and Tracing

OpenTelemetry is an open-source, vendor-neutral observability framework that provides APIs, libraries, and agents for collecting and exporting telemetry data from applications and services. OpenTelemetry supports various backends and integrations, including popular observability platforms like Jaeger, Zipkin, and Elastic.

Tracing with OpenTelemetry

Tracing is a key aspect of observability, and it involves recording the flow of requests and responses between components in a distributed system. OpenTelemetry provides a tracing API and libraries for various languages that enable developers to add tracing to their applications with minimal effort.

Here’s an example of how to use OpenTelemetry’s tracing API in a Node.js application:

const { NodeTracerProvider } = require('@opentelemetry/api');
          const { SimpleSpan } = require('@opentelemetry/api-trace');
          const { createTracer } = require('@opentelemetry/sdk-trace-node');
          
          const provider = new NodeTracerProvider();
          const tracer = createTracer('my-service');
          provider.register();
          
          const span = tracer.startSpan('handleRequest', {
            kind: 'server',
          });
          
          // Your request handling logic here
          
          span.setTag('my.custom.tag', 'value');
          span.addEvent('eventName', {
            description: 'An event description',
          });
          
          span.log('An informational message');
          
          // Your response handling logic here
          
          span.end();

In this example, we create a new tracer for our application, start a new span for a request handling function, set some tags and events, and end the span when the request is completed.

For more information on OpenTelemetry and its tracing features, please refer to the following resources:


          Sources:
          - OpenTelemetry: <https://opentelemetry.io/>
          - OpenTelemetry Documentation: <https://opentelemetry.io/docs/>
          - OpenTelemetry Tracing: <https://opentelemetry.io/docs/concepts/tracing/>
          - OpenTelemetry Node.js Tracing: <https://opentelemetry.io/docs/instrumentation/nodejs/>