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OpenTelemetry

5-Star OTel: OpenTelemetry Best Practices
October 27, 2022
Liz Fong-Jones

Liz Fong-Jones

5-Star OTel: OpenTelemetry Best Practices

Recently, Honeycomb held a roundtable discussion (available on demand) with Camal Cakar, Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Jimdo; Pierre Lacerte, Director of Software Development at Upgrade; and Kristin Smith, DevOps Engineer at Campspot. We talked about using OpenTelemetry and explained some important lessons the panelists learned—and are still learning in some cases.  Here are five best practices based on these lessons and Honeycomb’s own experience with OpenTelemetry.

OpenTelemetry
Import Datadog Traces Into Honeycomb
October 24, 2022
Michael Sickles

Michael Sickles

Import Datadog Traces Into Honeycomb

Getting existing telemetry into Honeycomb just got easier! With the release of the Datadog APM Receiver, you can send your Datadog traces to the OpenTelemetry Collector, and from there, to any OpenTelemetry-compatible endpoint.

OpenTelemetry
Iterating on an OpenTelemetry Collector Deployment in Kubernetes
October 20, 2022
Jessica Kerr (Jessitron)

Jessica Kerr (Jessitron)

Iterating on an OpenTelemetry Collector Deployment in Kubernetes

When you want to direct your observability data in a uniform fashion, you want to run an OpenTelemetry collector. If you have a Kubernetes cluster handy, that’s a useful place to run it. Helm is a quick way to get it running in Kubernetes; it encapsulates all the YAML object definitions that you need. OpenTelemetry publishes a Helm chart for the collector.

OpenTelemetry
Get More Out of OpenTelemetry With Honeycomb’s Latest Updates
October 17, 2022
Phillip Carter

Phillip Carter

Get More Out of OpenTelemetry With Honeycomb’s Latest Updates

Just a few short months ago, we talked about a bunch of updates to Honeycomb’s support for OpenTelemetry. To the surprise of no one, we’ve got more updates to share!

OpenTelemetry
Product Updates
Getting Started with OpenTelemetry
September 28, 2022
Phillip Carter

Phillip Carter

Getting Started with OpenTelemetry: Three Companies Check Into OTel Observability

Learn how Jimdo, Upgrade, and Campspot benefited from OpenTelemetry, whether in improved performance, or by avoiding vendor lock-in.

Observability
OpenTelemetry
OpenTelemetry Collector and Azure Container Apps
September 14, 2022
Martin Thwaites

Martin Thwaites

Running the OpenTelemetry Collector in Azure Container Apps

In this post, we’ll look at how to host the OpenTelemetry Collector in Azure Container Apps. There are a few gotchas with how it’s deployed, so hopefully this will stop you from hitting the same issues.

OpenTelemetry
OpenTelemetry Logs, OpenTelemetry Go, and the Road Ahead
August 31, 2022
Phillip Carter

Phillip Carter

OpenTelemetry Logs, OpenTelemetry Go, and the Road Ahead

We’ve got a lot of OpenTelemetry-flavored honey to send your way, ranging from OpenTelemetry SDK distribution updates to protocol support. We now support OpenTelemetry logs, released a new SDK distribution for OpenTelemetry Go, and have some updates around OpenTelemetry + Honeycomb to share. Let’s see what all the buzz is about this time!

OpenTelemetry
Monitoring Unit Tests with OpenTelemetry in .NET
August 22, 2022
Martin Thwaites

Martin Thwaites

Monitoring Unit Tests with OpenTelemetry in .NET

In this post, we’ll look at how you can use OpenTelemetry to monitor your unit tests and send that data to Honeycomb to visualize. It’s important to note that you don’t need to adopt Honeycomb, or even OpenTelemetry, in your production application to get the benefit of tracing. This example uses OpenTelemetry purely in the test project and provides great insights into our customer’s code.

Monitoring
OpenTelemetry
OpenTelemetry Collector
August 18, 2022
Jessica Kerr (Jessitron)

Jessica Kerr (Jessitron)

Send a Test Span Through an OpenTelemetry Collector

The scenario: you want to see distributed traces, maybe for your web app. You’ve set up an OpenTelemetry collector to receive OTLP traces in JSON over HTTP, and send those to Honeycomb (how to do that is another post, and we’ll link it here when it’s up). The question: does it work? Let’s test the collector and its connection to Honeycomb by sending a test span.

OpenTelemetry
Adding code tags to OpenTelemetry spans
July 29, 2022
Martin Thwaites

Martin Thwaites

Adding Code Tags to Your OpenTelemetry Spans

One of the reasons that OpenTelemetry is great at doing this is that a lot of the common attributes you may find on a span are given standard names, so the systems receiving the data to visualize them don’t need to know the specifics of your system. This is really a superpower of OpenTelemetry, as it gives a level playing field for consumers of that information—meaning that you, as a developer, can forget about vendor-specific things.

Observability
OpenTelemetry
OpenTelemetry and Observability
July 13, 2022
Brian Langbecker

Brian Langbecker

A to Z With Observability and OpenTelemetry

“How do I get started on instrumentation with OpenTelemetry, while also following best practices for the long-term?” This article is all about taking you from A to Z on instrumentation. Learn how to create immediate observability and see traces in your application right away, without changing code—and more!

OpenTelemetry
Tutorials
blog_AMO_martin
June 9, 2022
Martin Thwaites

Martin Thwaites

What the Hell is Activity Anyway?

Dear Miss O11y, I use .NET and I keep seeing something called `Activity` but in OpenTelemetry there is only talk about “Span” and “Trace,” why? And what should I be using? Kthxbye This is…

Ask Miss O11y
OpenTelemetry
blog_AMO_jessitron
June 6, 2022
Jessica Kerr (Jessitron)

Jessica Kerr (Jessitron)

Ask Miss O11y: As a developer, how can I try out observability?

Dear Miss o11y, What’s the first small thing to do in o11y that would teach me something, bring something valuable, and open the way for something else? Observability doesn’t have to be a big,…

Ask Miss O11y
OpenTelemetry