Deploying the OpenTelemetry Collector to AKS
The Collector is the focal point for telemetry inside your cluster. Instead of your containerized applications sending directly to your OpenTelemetry-capable backend (the place that...
OpenTelemetry Best Practices #3: Data Prep and Cleansing
Having telemetry is all well and good—amazing, in fact. It’s easy to do: add some OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation libraries to your stack and they’ll fill your...
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...
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...
How to Avoid Paying for Honeycomb
You probably know that we have a generous free plan that allows you to send 20 million events per month. This is enough for many...
What Happens to DevOps when the Kubernetes Adrenaline Rush Ends?
Kubernetes has been around for nearly 10 years now. In the past five years, we’ve seen a drastic increase in adoption by engineering teams of...
Deploying the OpenTelemetry Collector to Kubernetes with Helm
The OpenTelemetry Collector is a useful application to have in your stack. However, deploying it has always felt a little time consuming: working out how...
Trace Propagation and Public API Endpoints in .NET: Part 1 (Disable All)
One of the issues with the W3C trace context is that it doesn’t define any standards for how far a trace is to propagate. If...
Don’t Let Observability Inflate Your Cloud Costs
We saw a shift this year in how the technology sector honed in on sustainability from a cost perspective. In particular, looking at where they’re...
Ask Miss O11y: To Metric or to Trace?
Dear Miss O11y, I remember reading quite interesting opinions from you about usage of metrics and traces in an application. Did you elaborate on those...
Does OpenTelemetry in .NET Cause Performance Degradation?
Contrary to Betteridge’s Law of Tabloid Headlines, the answer to the question, "does OpenTelemetry in .NET cause performance degradation?" is yes, but context is important. I...
Twelve-Factor Apps and Modern Observability
The Twelve-Factor App methodology is a go-to guide for people building microservices. In its time, it presented a step change in how we think about...
Ask Miss O11y: Is There a Beginner’s Guide On How to Add Observability to Your Applications?
Dear Miss O11y, I want to make my microservices more observable. Currently, I only have logs. I’ll add metrics soon, but I’m not really sure...
Understanding Distributed Tracing with a Message Bus
So you're used to debugging systems using a distributed trace, but your system is about to introduce a message queue—and that will work the same…...