Debugging production issues in microservices can be challenging due to the complexity and number of interacting services. Observability is crucial for understanding system behavior, which includes three primary pillars: logs, metrics, and traces. OpenTelemetry stands out as an ideal tool due to its open-source nature, cross-language compatibility, vendor neutrality, and widespread industry support. It enhances traditional monitoring tools that typically focus on logs and metrics by incorporating tracing capabilities, making it a game-changer for microservices management.
Observability is more than just logs. It's about understanding why your system is behaving a certain way, not just what it's doing. At the core, we're talking about three pillars: Logs - Raw events, helpful for debugging; Metrics - Numbers you can track over time (e.g. request count, CPU); Traces - End-to-end request flows across services.
Observability matters. If you are building or maintaining microservices in 2024, OpenTelemetry is the tool you want in your corner.
Traditional monitoring tools mostly focus on metrics and logs, but tracing is the real game-changer for microservices.
We experimented with several observability stacks - Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, Jaeger, Zipkin - but they all had one problem: either they were vendor-locked or lacked consistency across languages.
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