OpenTelemetry Best Practices #2: Agents, Sidecars, Collectors, Coded Instrumentation
For years, we’ve been installing what vendors have referred to as “agents” that reach into our applications and pull out useful telemetry information from them. From monitoring agents, to full-blown APM tools, this has been the standard for many decades. With OpenTelemetry though, the term “agent” isn’t used as much, and in most scenarios means something slightly different. In this post, we’ll talk about the fact that you can achieve the same “hands off” process with OpenTelemetry, but also when you should and shouldn’t consider using the more automatic approach to telemetry collection.
