The OpenTelemetry Collector Builder is a tool that allows users to compile their own custom instance of the Collector. This is useful in a few different scenarios. Maybe the existing distributions contain more components than you need. Choosing specific components reduces the complexity and size of the resulting Collector. …

The OpenTelemetry demo application version 1.4 was released in April of 2023. If you’re unfamiliar with the demo, it is comprised of many micro services written in various languages. The services are instrumented using OpenTelemetry and can be run in Kubernetes or in Docker using Docker Compose. The main purpose…

The following is an excerpt of Cloud Native Observability with OpenTelemetry So, now that we’ve learned how to use OpenTelemetry to generate traces, metrics, and logs, we want to do something with all this telemetry data. To make the most of this data, we will need to be able to…

I couldn’t find a good answer to this question and I looked for hours. Ultimately, I decided to document it here for the next time I need it and for anyone else out there who’s looking to disable go modules in in Visual Studio Code. Open up Settings (⌘,) and search for “go tools env vars”

We’ve all been there. You want to get started with distributed tracing, but don’t have the time to revisit the codebase of dozens, if not hundreds of dozens of services in your system. Don’t worry, OpenTelemetry’s got you covered. …

Preface: This is not an article defining what the Berkeley Packet Filter(BPF) is. The internet is full of resources on the topic and I’m definitely not an expert on it. Check out this talk by Brendan Gregg if you’d like to know more. One of the biggest pains in the…

There’s a scene from the Simpson episode “Lisa the Simpson” where Lisa appears on a television broadcast to make an appeal to the audience. She urges citizens to use and treasure their brain, in fear that she was about to lose her own due to the “Simpson gene”. As I…

Here comes a rant. There’s a handful of words I hear people using repeatedly that make my skin crawl. Say for example I’m sitting in a meeting, coffeeshop, or at a conference. The speaker will say “check out this sexy code I just wrote” and immediately my train of thought…

Distributed applications come in all shapes and sizes. In many cases, an Application Programming Interface (API) talks to another one and distributed tracing through Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) headers works just great. But what about other cases? Can distributed tracing work for event driven architecture? …