Unified Observability Through Open Standards and Distributed Tracing

"Unified observability signifies the possession of one consistent view over all the parts of a distributed system - applications, infrastructure, and services. With modern systems being spread over several clouds, microservices, and APIs, the only way to have such visibility is through open standards and distributed tracing. Standards such as OpenTelemetry not only make it easier to collect but also to correlate the telemetry data (logs, metrics, and traces) from various components."

"According to the Grafana Labs Observability Survey, 85% of respondents reported investing in OpenTelemetry. Distributed tracing is an excellent counterpart that illustrates the journey of a single request through multiple services, thereby enabling engineers to quickly identify the areas where performance is being hampered as well as where errors are occurring. In this article, we will learn how unified observability is made possible with the use of open standards, more specifically, OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, and their deployment in AWS."

Unified observability provides a single, consistent view across applications, infrastructure, and services in distributed systems. Modern systems distributed across clouds, microservices, and APIs require open standards and distributed tracing to achieve that visibility. OpenTelemetry enables collection and correlation of telemetry data including logs, metrics, and traces from heterogeneous components. Widespread investment in OpenTelemetry (85% per Grafana Labs survey) reflects industry adoption. Distributed tracing reveals the end-to-end journey of individual requests across services, enabling fast identification of performance bottlenecks and error locations. Deployment patterns on cloud platforms such as AWS and harmonized observability stacks allow teams to integrate data across languages and vendors.

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