A Hands-on Guide to OpenTelemetry - Programmatic Instrumentation for Developers

Are you ready to start your journey on the road to collecting telemetry data from your applications? Great observability begins with great instrumentation! 

In this series you'll explore how to adopt OpenTelemetry (OTel) and how to instrument an application to collect tracing telemetry. You'll learn how to leverage out-of-the-box automatic instrumentation tools and understand when it's necessary to explore more advanced manual instrumentation for your applications. By the end of this series you'll have an understanding of how telemetry travels from your applications, to the OpenTelemetry Collector, and be ready to bring OpenTelemetry to your future projects. Everything discussed here is supported by a hands-on, self-paced workshop authored by Paige Cruz. 

The previous article we explored how to gain better insights by adding manual instrumentation to our application leveraging the existing auto-instrumentation. In this article, we move on to programmatic instrumentation in our application as developers would in their daily coding. We'll be using OTel libraries and eventually visualize the collected telemetry data in Jaeger.

A Hands-on Guide to OpenTelemetry - Better Tracing with Automatic Instrumentation

 Are you ready to start your journey on the road to collecting telemetry data from your applications? Great observability begins with great instrumentation! 

In this series you'll explore how to adopt OpenTelemetry (OTel) and how to instrument an application to collect tracing telemetry. You'll learn how to leverage out-of-the-box automatic instrumentation tools and understand when it's necessary to explore more advanced manual instrumentation for your applications. By the end of this series you'll have an understanding of how telemetry travels from your applications, to the OpenTelemetry Collector, and be ready to bring OpenTelemetry to your future projects. Everything discussed here is supported by a hands-on, self-paced workshop authored by Paige Cruz. 

The previous article we took our first steps in generating telemetry data using automatic instrumentation. In this article, we explore how to gain better insights by adding manual instrumentation to our application leveraging the existing auto-instrumentation.

A Hands-on Guide to OpenTelemetry - Using Automatic Instrumentation

 Are you ready to start your journey on the road to collecting telemetry data from your applications? Great observability begins with great instrumentation! 

In this series you'll explore how to adopt OpenTelemetry (OTel) and how to instrument an application to collect tracing telemetry. You'll learn how to leverage out-of-the-box automatic instrumentation tools and understand when it's necessary to explore more advanced manual instrumentation for your applications. By the end of this series you'll have an understanding of how telemetry travels from your applications, to the OpenTelemetry Collector, and be ready to bring OpenTelemetry to your future projects. Everything discussed here is supported by a hands-on, self-paced workshop authored by Paige Cruz. 

The previous article introduced observability concepts and terms as related to OpenTelemetry and its components. In this article, we continue onwards with our first steps in generating telemetry data using automatic instrumentation.

Tech Meetup Glasgow - Observability for You and Me with OpenTelemetry (slides)

I've been a guest to the Tech Meetup in Edinburgh a few times over the years and was recently asked to drop in on the meetup of the same name in Glasgow.

This meetup is a generalist event for everyone in the Glasgow tech community. It welcomes people with all levels of experience, even if you are starting your journey into tech as a student, boot camper, or you're thinking of starting your development career, you are more than welcome.

I'm going to be sharing an introduction to both cloud native observability and touch on tracing with OpenTelemetry on 4 July 2024. I'm the second talk of the evening but it all kicks off at 18:00.

Below you'll find the slides I used and the links to the workshop referenced at the end to provide attendees with a hands-on workshop to build out the demo discussed at the event.

A Hands-on Guide to OpenTelemetry - Intro to Observability

Are you ready to start your journey on the road to collecting telemetry data from your applications? Great observability begins with great instrumentation! 

In this series you'll explore how to adopt OpenTelemetry (OTel) and how to instrument an application to collect tracing telemetry. You'll learn how to leverage out-of-the-box automatic instrumentation tools and understand when it's necessary to explore more advanced manual instrumentation to your applications. By the end of this series you'll have an understanding of how telemetry travels from your applications, to the OpenTelemetry Collector, and be ready to bring OpenTelemetry to your future projects. Everything discussed here is supported by a hands-on, self-paced workshop authored by Paige Cruze. 

This first article takes time to lay the foundation, defining common observability and monitoring terms that help us gain an understanding of the role of OpenTelemetry and its components.

DevOpsDays Amsterdam 2024 - Observability Metrics for You and Me with Prometheus (workshop)

Later this month I'm going to be in Amsterdam, close to home for once, at the lovely and well organized DevOpsDays Amsterdam 2024. I've been given the honor of hosting a three hour long workshop based on our work around getting started with metrics using the CNCF project Prometheus.

The event is three days of fun and sharing technology learnings from all corners of the industry. As the event site says, the Netherlands is home to a large, vibrant technology community. Amsterdam, in particular, has been a flurry of activity in the past several years, drawing attention from around the globe.

Devopsdays Amsterdam brings all disciplines, such as development, operations, QA, InfoSec, management, and leadership, together to discuss culture, tools and skills to make better organizations and products. The expectation is around 600 attendees this year and will be held from June 19-21, 2024 at the Pakhuis de Zwijger in the center of Amsterdam.

The first day is all about workshops, focusing on hands-on activities, from coding to cooperation in several parallel tracks in smaller settings. The format of the following 2 days includes a single track of 30-minute talks in the morning, followed by Ignite talks (5-minute, auto forwarding slides). 

Below is my workshop abstract and details.

Telemetry Pipelines Workshop - Avoiding telemetry data loss with Fluent Bit

Are you ready for getting started with cloud native observability with telemetry pipelines? 

This article is part of a series exploring a workshop guiding you through the open source project Fluent Bit, what it is, a basic installation, and setting up a first telemetry pipeline project. Learn how to manage your cloud native data from source to destination using the telemetry pipeline phases covering collection, aggregation, transformation, and forwarding from any source to any destination. 

The previous article in this series we explored what backpressure was, how it manifests in telemetry pipelines, and took the first steps to mitigating this with Fluent Bit. In this next article, we look at how to enable Fluent Bit features that will help with avoiding telemetry data loss we saw in the previous article.

You can find more details in the accompanying workshop lab.

Let's get started with this use case.

Cloud Native + Kubernetes Edinburgh Meetup - Power up with Podman (slides)

Tonight I returned to the Cloud Native + Kubernetes (K8S) Edinburgh meetup to share new content with my technical friends there in Scotland.  This is a really fun group, active and engaged with both questions and discussions about my content.

Exactly what I'm looking for in a meetup!

Attendees here are knowledgeable as they are often active in their daily jobs with the various technologies that a meetup covers. I shared a fun session on how to get started with Podman, a fully open source OCI compliant container tool for working with container images in a developer environment.

This was a talk my team has given previously, but we continue to perfect it by sharing with diverse audiences. Below are the slides and abstract from my talk.

Platmosphere - Choose Your Own Adventure with Observability Pitfalls (slides)

Today I was in Milan, Italy for an  event known as Platmosphere. This was an event dedicated to platform enthusiasts and turned out to be a really fun chance to share some of my observability insights with the practitioners putting platforms in the hands of their developers.

I was approached specifically about giving my talk and was flattered that they thought it was special enough to get me on the inaugural event schedule. 

It was really exciting to share this with platform engineering enthusiasts as they are on the front lines of the pain around providing platforms for their developer organizations, trying to provide observability-first processes, and tackling the challenges that this brings.

Below you'll find the slides and abstract from my talk.

Platmosphere - 3 Pitfalls Everyone Should Avoid with Cloud Native Observability

Next week I'll be off to Milan, Italy for an in-person event known as Platmosphere. This is an event dedicated to platform enthusiasts and takes place on 14 May 2024.

I was approached specifically about the talk I'm going to give that the organizers had seen from a meetup recording. It's a special one that gives the audience a chance to participate in crafting the narrative that comes out of the session. It's a choose your own adventure style talk about the pitfalls everyone should avoid with cloud native observability.

I am very excited to share this with platform engineering enthusiasts as they are on the front lines of the pain around providing platforms for their developer organizations, trying to provide observability-first processes, and tackling the challenges that this brings.

Cloud Native + Kubernetes Edinburgh Meetup - Power up with Podman

I'm headed back to the Cloud Native + Kubernetes (K8S) Edinburgh meetup, joining them on 15 May 2024. Meetups are really essential to my job, as they are the grounds where I can test out both ideas and hands-on content. 

Attendees are knowledgeable as they are often active in their daily jobs with the various technologies that a meetup covers. They are the perfect candidates to provide feedback on new ideas or help with crafting existing ones towards perfection.

I'll be sharing a fun session of how to get started with Podman, a fully open source OCI compliant container tool for working with container images in a developer environment.

Telemetry Pipelines Workshop - Understanding Backpressure with Fluent Bit

 Are you ready for getting started with cloud native observability with telemetry pipelines? 

This article is part of a series exploring a workshop guiding you through the open source project Fluent Bit, what it is, a basic installation, and setting up a first telemetry pipeline project. Learn how to manage your cloud native data from source to destination using the telemetry pipeline phases covering collection, aggregation, transformation, and forwarding from any source to any destination. 

The previous article in this series we explored using the filtering phase to modify events even based on conditions in those events. In this article we dig into what backpressure is, how it manifests in our telemetry pipelines, and take first steps to mitigate this with Fluent Bit.

You can find more details in the accompanying workshop lab.

Let's get started with this use case.

Telemetry Pipelines Workshop - Filtering Events with Fluent Bit

 Are you ready for getting started with cloud native observability with telemetry pipelines? 

This article is part of a series exploring a workshop guiding you through the open source project Fluent Bit, what it is, a basic installation, and setting up a first telemetry pipeline project. Learn how to manage your cloud native data from source to destination using the telemetry pipeline phases covering collection, aggregation, transformation, and forwarding from any source to any destination. 

The previous article in this series we explored the use case routing events with Fluent Bit. In this article we step back and look closer at how we can use the filtering phase to modify events even based on conditions in those events.

You can find more details in the accompanying workshop lab.

Let's get started with this use case.