opentelemetry-examples VS examples

We focused on the observability ecosystem and took the time to interact with our friends from Lightstep, New Relic, Honeycomb, Dynatrace, Instana, and many more. With that in mind, keep an eye out for more integrations coming to Tracetest!

Lightstep bills itself as a platform for the reliability of cloud-native applications. The people behind Lightstep co-founded OpenTelemetry and OpenTracing, which gives them a unique perspective on the use cases of distributed tracing and the value of having a vendor-neutral tracing data format.

In the last 5 to 10 years, new Observability vendors have entered the market, including Honeycomb, Instana, Lightstep and Datadog. Similarly, traditional APM vendors such as Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic, as well as SIEM (and log management) vendors such as Splunk and Sumo Logic, have joined them in the Observability space too. Finally you also have major cloud providers such as AWS with their own observability solution. Each of them is attempting to address the observability issues that modern architecture presents by using Logs, Metrics, Traces, and Events.

I spent Day 2 at the Colony Club to attend OTel Unplugged. This event was sponsored by Lightstep, Honeycomb, New Relic, Splunk, Dynatrace, Crowdstrike, and NGINX. I came into the event not knowing what to expect. I can sometimes clamp up when I’m around folks that I don’t know, but because I was helping with the event check-in, I got to say hello to a number of the attendees, which helped break the ice. And it turns out that there were a lot of names that I recognized from my work in the OTel community, and it was nice to connect in person with folks whom I’d only previously met through Slack or Zoom.

The example in this tutorial can be found in the lightstep/opentelemetry-examples repo. We will be working with three main files:

Note how we don’t have to set a LS_ACCESS_TOKEN, since that’s already configured in the Collector’s config.yml file. Just make sure that you have a running OTel Collector instance!

Note: If you’re looking for full code listings, don’t panic! You see them in the Lightstep OTel examples repository.

Honeycomb

I haven't used anything else, but I'll gladly shill for https://honeycomb.io.

With all of this in place I went a step further and added Opentelemetry to track the stats of how often the routine was being triggered on Honeycomb.

Events can be used in many meaningful ways. The Event subsystem of B is pretty much a co-evolution of what honeycomb.io offers, but implemented completely differently - it is on bare-metal, and hence a lot cheaper. Because of that, B never subsampled, but always kept a full low of all events anywhere, no exceptions.

It should be noted that this is a very oblique ad for http://honeycomb.io. That in no way impugns the content of the post, and in fact, it's given the content of the post that I feel compelled to point out that, ultimately, this is an ad. Because what is sales and advertising, anyway? It's just a way to get you to buy a product, and you can't do that if you've never even heard about the product. I'm not currently in the market for an observability solution (something something splunk) but if I were, I've now heard of them.

The question though, is why does money ruin everything? The naive questions of an open source zealot to a proprietary software salesperson are one thing, but since we all need money to live, why does money being part of the equation (eg if someone was getting paid to post here) ruin things? Would a "donate to open source" button be more successful if the donate text is "buy me a coffee", "buy me a beer", or "upgrade my beer from Coors light"?

https://xkcd.com/2347/ was and is true, and if we don't figure out a way to change that, I don't really see a future for open source.

Very cool to see honeycomb.io is doing that. I'm about to embark on my distributed tracing learning journey, this makes me want to try honeycomb right away.

Caveat: I work for a vendor in the O11y space (https://honeycomb.io) as a Developer Advocate, however, this advice is generic, not specific to our platform.

I spent Day 2 at the Colony Club to attend OTel Unplugged. This event was sponsored by Lightstep, Honeycomb, New Relic, Splunk, Dynatrace, Crowdstrike, and NGINX. I came into the event not knowing what to expect. I can sometimes clamp up when I’m around folks that I don’t know, but because I was helping with the event check-in, I got to say hello to a number of the attendees, which helped break the ice. And it turns out that there were a lot of names that I recognized from my work in the OTel community, and it was nice to connect in person with folks whom I’d only previously met through Slack or Zoom.

It's no surprise that my apps are mostly written using Sanic as I'm pretty involved with the project. I've been wanting to start testing honeycomb out as well, so it seemed the perfect opportunity to try out.