I recently learned that Honeycomb is hosting a virtual workshop on November 12th called Honeycomb's Advanced Instrumentation with OpenTelemetry. I enjoyed learning about Honeycomb's mission at their Observability Day, so I’m looking forward to this one 🙊.

If you're curious about instrumentation with OpenTelemetry, this is a great opportunity to learn tips and get insights. The event will cover advanced instrumentation, distributed tracing, debugging, and observability strategies.

Getting Started with OpenTelemetry

I've come to see OpenTelemetry as a bridge between applications and observability platforms like Honeycomb. It helps streamline how we collect, process, and analyze data, making it easier to understand our application's behavior. OpenTelemetry’s auto-instrumentation option gives us a quick way to start collecting data with no code changes. If you haven’t used OpenTelemetry before, this is a great first step to get familiar before attending the workshop.

OpenTelemetry at High Level

Imagine OpenTelemetry as adding sensors to your application so it can capture data like metrics, logs, and traces. Here’s my understanding:

Instrument: Adding markers in your code is like installing sensors in a car to track important information, such as fuel levels, speed, or engine temperature. OpenTelemetry’s auto-instrumentation provides a quick setup to gather essential data, like request latency and error rates, with no code changes.

Collect: Once data is captured, it needs to be collected and processed, similar to how a car’s central computer gathers information from various sensors. OpenTelemetry’s Collector serves as this central hub, pulling in data from one or multiple sources. You can customize how the data is transformed using a configuration file to fit your specific needs. The Collector can run as a standalone service for centralized data collection, or as a lightweight agent on the same host as your application.

Transfer to an Observability Platform: After processing, the data is sent to an observability platform, like a car’s dashboard, where you can view, analyze, and interpret it. Platforms like Honeycomb let you track trends, find issues, and make decisions to improve your application’s health and performance.