Technology · Ebook

OpenTelemetry: The Standard for Observability

by Shriira Press

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is the vendor-neutral standard for generating telemetry — traces, metrics, and logs — from your software: instrument once and send the data to any backend, free from lock-in. This free book teaches it from the ground up: observability and the three signals, OTel's architecture (API/SDK, OTLP, the Collector, semantic conventions), instrumenting code (automatic and manual), the signals in depth and how they correlate, context propagation and W3C Trace Context, the OpenTelemetry Collector and telemetry pipelines, semantic conventions and exporting to backends like Jaeger and Prometheus, sampling and managing volume, and operating OpenTelemetry in production. Ten focused chapters with clear diagrams that show how to make any system observable — instrumented once, portable everywhere, with correlated traces, metrics, and logs.

Contents

1. 1Preface
2. 2Chapter 1 — What OpenTelemetry Is
3. 3Chapter 2 — Observability and the Three Signals
4. 4Chapter 3 — Architecture
5. 5Chapter 4 — Instrumentation
6. 6Chapter 5 — The Signals in Depth
7. 7Chapter 6 — Context Propagation
8. 8Chapter 7 — The OpenTelemetry Collector
9. 9Chapter 8 — Semantic Conventions and Backends
10. 10Chapter 9 — Sampling and Managing Volume
11. 11Chapter 10 — Operating OpenTelemetry and Putting It Together