Whitepapers OpenTelemetry Observability

How OpenTelemetry and Semantic Telemetry Will Reshape Observability

Telemetry is a way for a software system to express what it’s doing to a human operator. This is something you’ve probably experienced in your career—from your first ‘Hello, World!’ to your millionth alert('ran to here'), you’ve used telemetry to better understand what’s actually happening in your code.

Without telemetry, we’re quite literally in the dark. The only way to understand how a piece of software is working is to look at its outputs, and the end user-facing outputs usually aren’t that useful when you’re trying to track down a bug or improve system performance across thousands or millions of users.

In this whitepaper, Austin Parker, Director of Open Source at Honeycomb, speaks to semantic telemetry and OpenTelemetry in the realm of observability. You'll learn:

• What is semantic data, and why is it important?
• The tradeoff triangle in observability
• How semantic telemetry addresses these tradeoffs
• OpenTelemetry and semantic telemetry
• OpenTelemetry's relationship to wide events
• Why traditional tooling isn’t enough

Download this free whitepaper now.