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....
OpenTelemetry Best Practices #1: Naming
Naming things, and specifically consistently naming things, is still one of the most useful pieces of work you can do in telemetry. It’s often overlooked...
Sending OpenTelemetry Data From AWS Lambda to Honeycomb
In this post, Chris describes how to send OpenTelemetry (OTel) data from an AWS Lambda instance to Honeycomb....
Much Ado About OpenTelemetry
There is so much good work that OpenTelemetry has done in the software industry, specifically around the domain of observability, in the last five years....
Data Sovereignty and OpenTelemetry
In today’s economic and regulatory environment, data sovereignty is increasingly top of mind for observability teams. The rules and regulations surrounding telemetry data can often...
Avoid Stubbing Your Toe on Telemetry Changes
When you have questions about your software, telemetry data is there for you. Over time, you make friends with your data, learning what queries take...
Effective Trace Instrumentation with Semantic Conventions
There’s plenty of literature on the mechanics of instrumenting code with OpenTelemetry and delivering it to Honeycomb. However, I’ve not found many guides on the...
Building a Secure OpenTelemetry Collector
The OpenTelemetry Collector is a core part of telemetry pipelines, which makes it one of the parts of your infrastructure that must be as secure...
Action Recommended: OpenTelemetry HTTP Attributes Breaking Changes
Earlier this year, the folks working on OpenTelemetry launched an effort to stabilize HTTP Semantic Conventions. In November 2023, OpenTelemetry announced that HTTP Semantic Conventions...
A Practical Guide to Debugging Browser Performance With OpenTelemetry
So you’ve taken a look at the core web vitals for your site and… it’s not looking good. You’re overwhelmed, and you don’t know what...
Observability Is About Confidence
Observability is important to understand what’s happening in production. But carving out the time to add instrumentation to a codebase is daunting, and often treated...
Simplify OpenTelemetry Pipelines with Headers Setter
In telemetry jargon, a pipeline is a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of nodes that carry emitted signals from an application to a backend. In an...
OpenTelemetry For Humans
Who is software for? It’s an interesting question, because there’s an obvious answer. It’s for the users, right? If your job is to write software,...
Rescue Struggling Pods from Scratch
Containers are an amazing technology. They provide huge benefits and create useful constraints for distributing software. Golang-based software doesn’t need a container in the same...
OpenTelemetry Gotchas: Phantom Spans
At work, we use OpenTelemetry extensively to trace execution of our Haskell codebase. We struggled for several months with a mysterious tracing issue in our...