The Value of OpenTelemetry in Observability

As infrastructure becomes more complex, the quest for better observability continues. With increased containerization, third-party applications and generally increased network complexity, it becomes difficult for organizations to track issues of stability and performance. But OpenTelemetry can be used to improve upon observability throughout a network by enhancing and consolidating reporting throughout all applications and services.

So, what is OpenTelemetry and how can it help your organization’s processes? Here’s what you need to know.

What is OpenTelemetry?

OpenTelemetry is a Cloud-Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)-curated open source set of libraries, agents and components designed to increase the visibility of services. Through OpenTelemetry, organizations are able to better collect telemetric data for the purposes of debugging and management. A scalable, flexible solution, OpenTelemetry is able to adjust to organizations as they continue to grow.

With OpenTelemetry, data is collected through:

• Metrics
• Distributed Traces
• Resource Metadata
• Logs

The data is then sent to back-end platforms such as Jaeger or Prometheus for processing. All of this together enhances observability for the organization, making it easier for an organization to collect the data it needs to observe and mitigate issues appropriately.

Greater levels of observability improve an organization’s reliability and reduce downtime. With better reliability, organizations are able to track down and resolve incidents much faster. Before the OpenTelemetry solution, developers might have used OpenCensus, OpenTracing or other similar products. While these products are excellent on their own, they don’t necessarily meet all the needs of modern networks.

How Does it Work?

OpenTelemetry works on three major observability systems: tracing, metrics and logging. For tracing, OpenTelemetry makes it easier to identify failures and performance issues by tracking requests within the system. For metrics, processes running within the system are closely tracked and reported on, with histograms, gauges and other easy-to-read graphical reporting. For logging, application-specific messages can be analyzed.

Observability throughout a system has always relied upon tracing, metrics and logging. But it’s more difficult to complete tracing today because each action needs to go through so many layers of application and resources. When paired with vague log data, the process of tracking down a single incident can take hours, because the information isn’t always consistently siloed. OpenTelemetry (and other similar products) work to correct this by creating a consolidated system by which metrics, tracing and logging can be brought together.

As an open source project, OpenTelemetry is available on GitHub for those who want to be a part of the community to influence and improve it. Of course, OpenCensus and OpenTracing are also open source solutions.

So what’s the difference between OpenTelemetry, OpenCensus and OpenTracing? When should one be used over the other? And can they be used together?

OpenTelemetry vs. OpenCensus

Let’s take a look at OpenTelemetry versus OpenCensus. Both are used to boost observability, but they are generally mutually exclusive platforms because they each tackle the issue of observability from different angles. OpenCensus provides distributed tracing and time-series metrics from applications via a collection of libraries. Applications need to download a metrics exporter, and which one is used depends on the application microservices involved. OpenCensus will collect trace data, but OpenCensus will also collect time-series metrics. OpenTelemetry is used to connect OpenCensus and OpenTracing, providing the benefits of both. This creates a far more robust observability solution.

OpenTelemetry vs. OpenTracing

OpenTelemetry versus OpenTracing is similar to OpenTelemetry versus OpenCensus. OpenTracing also solves the same problems as OpenCensus but is usually mutually exclusive. OpenTracing is a specification for tracing APIs rather than library. Developers are able to either create their own tracer or use the OpenTracing version. OpenTracing is often faster and easier to deploy and use, but may not provide as robust analytics or metrics as OpenCensus. But again, OpenTelemetry makes it possible to use both OpenTracing and OpenCensus at the same time, through its consolidated libraries and support.

OpenTelemetry is an ideal technology for organizations that want to increase their observability. Through OpenTracing, developers are able to achieve greater levels of visibility throughout the network; track metrics and performance; and react to issues within the organization swiftly and more accurately.

While in the past developers may have been limited to either OpenTracing or OpenCensus, today developers are able to use OpenTelemetry for both function sets. Even better, since it remains an open source solution, developers are able to contribute to the OpenTelemetry community.