OpenTelemetry (Otel for short) is an open source project that aims to provide observability for distributed systems. It provides a standardized set of APIs, tools, and libraries for generating, collecting, and analyzing tracing, metrics, and logs data for distributed applications.
1. Detailed explanation of OpenTelemetry
1. Observability standards: OpenTelemetry is committed to defining a set of standardized APIs and protocols to achieve consistency and interoperability of observability data. It provides a cross-language, cross-platform API that enables developers to easily generate and inject trace and metrics data into applications and integrate with other OpenTelemetry-compliant tools and systems.
2. Cross-language and cross-platform support: OpenTelemetry supports multiple programming languages and runtime environments. It provides software development kits (SDKs) and libraries for various languages such as Java, Python, Go, JavaScript, etc. This way, developers can use the same OpenTelemetry APIs and tools across different languages and platforms to generate and collect observability data.
3. Distributed Tracing: OpenTelemetry provides a trace function for collecting and analyzing the request process and call chain of distributed applications. It allows developers to inject trace data into applications and trace the path of requests through a distributed system. This helps developers identify and resolve performance issues, debug distributed systems, and optimize application request processing.
4. Metrics collection: OpenTelemetry also provides the metrics collection function to collect key performance indicators of applications. Developers can use the OpenTelemetry API to define and record custom metrics and send them to back-end data storage or monitoring systems for analysis and visualization. This helps understand application performance trends, resource utilization, and system health.
5. Logging integration: OpenTelemetry supports correlating log data with trace and indicator data, providing a comprehensive view of observability. Developers can use the OpenTelemetry API to log applications and correlate the logs with corresponding trace and metric data. This helps with log analysis and troubleshooting in a distributed environment.
6. Various integrations and plug-ins: OpenTelemetry can be integrated with multiple existing monitoring and observation tools, such as Prometheus, Jaeger, Zipkin, Elasticsearch, etc. In addition, it supports integration with cloud-native environments and service meshes such as Kubernetes and Istio to provide a more comprehensive observability solution.
In conclusion, OpenTelemetry is an open source project aimed at achieving observability in distributed systems, helping developers generate, collect and analyze Observability data for the application. This enables developers to better understand and manage the performance, health, and behavior of distributed systems.
2. The relationship between Otel and Jaeger
Otel+Jaeger refers to the use of a combination of OpenTelemetry and Jaeger to implement distributed tracing.
- OpenTelemetry provides a standardized set of APIs and tools that enable developers to generate and inject trace data into applications.
- Jaeger, as an implementation of OpenTelemetry, can be used to collect, store and visualize these trace data.
By using Otel+Jaeger, developers can use OpenTelemetry API in the application to generate trace data and send it to Jaeger for display and analysis.
In short, Otel+Jaeger is a combination of OpenTelemetry and Jaeger for distributed tracing and observability. OpenTelemetry provides a set of standardized APIs and tools, and Jaeger, as one of the implementations of OpenTelemetry, provides distributed tracing capabilities. By using Otel+Jaeger, developers can use OpenTelemetry API to generate trace data and visualize and analyze it through Jaeger.