Duran Duran - Is There Something I Should Know? (1982)
Getting Informed
If you are new to OpenTelemetry — or “Otel” for short — that’s understandable. You might have come across application performance management companies, tools, techniques, or even projects like OpenTracing1 or OpenCensus2 that predate Otel.
I made a break, I run out yesterday 🎶
During the .com years, it was common to find references to “load testing” or “traffic simulation” software and vendors in response to ever greater expectations for performance of so-called “3 tier” web applications. The common thinking then was that by instrumenting each tier and then simulating the growing consumer web traffic before you launched a website, you might find performance bottlenecks to fix leading to a better end user outcome — especially if there was a commercial component to the website such as e-commerce, etc. that relied upon performance layers for the web servers, app servers, and database servers.
Fast forward a few years and the IT analyst community identified a growing number of vendors supplying software performance agents, software performance collectors, and performance measurement oriented tools as the “application performance management” market. By 2013, application performance management had become a somewhat crowded3 multibillion dollar market that is currently4 on track to become better known as the “observability” market.
By 2015, The OpenTracing Project was launched by Uber application performance management engineers with the ambition of proving a vendor neutral instrumentation library for developers interested in application performance management. Similarly, Google application performance management engineers using similar internal tools became the inspiration for a clean room implementation of those tools called OpenCensus.
Maybe next year maybe no go 🎶
By early 20195, convergence took place as OpenTracing and OpenCensus merged to create OpenTelemetry6. So, if you are starting out with an understanding of Otel you can relegate references to OpenTracing as a historical foundational footnote that has been archived by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation7 as of early 2022.
Who uses Otel?
Well, first, let’s recall recent posts regarding platform engineering and telemetry.
Now that we’re familiar with a few definitions of platform engineering, it’s time for specific examples as it relates to Otel. Luckily, Charity Majors, CTO of Honeycomb.io recently provided succinct examples8 across both Plaform Engineers and Site Reliability Engineers.
Platform Engineers:
Builds for Internal developer teams
Uses APM, observability, tracing. Cares a lot about instrumentation and OpenTelemetry.
Site Reliability Engineers:
Builds for customers
Uses metrics, logs, dashboards; monitoring, alerting, and agent/sidecar/blackbox telemetry.
What it takes to make it show 🎶
Who else is a great resource of information on Otel?
The following tweets from 2021-2022 are just a sample of the amazing community to consider Following or adding to your Lists.
Same data side by side in @LightstepHQ and in @honeycombio, from the #OpenTelemetry collector receiving browser instrumentation and teeing it to both sinks (thanks @austinlparker!)
Before OTel, every vendor had its own libraries, and switching (or trying out) new vendors was a bitch.
On Monday I’ll start my new role as an Eng Director @datadoghq working on APM and figuring out our plans for @opentelemetry.
Excited to try my hand on the product side of the business.
So, how will Otel factor into the next industrial revolution?
Until next time… Place your bets!
Work Plug!
As a reminder, I work at Taos, an IBM Company. If you’d like to learn more about Taos, you can register for our digital event this week on Thursday 20-October 2022 where I’ll speak with Larry LaBas and Tim Clark, about Enterprise security posture in a 40 minute session entitled “Is Compliance Part of Your Culture?”
Disclosure
I am linking to my disclosure.