opentelemetry-specification VS otel-with-apache-pulsar

OpenTelemetry is a standard for implementing telemetry in your applications. It provides a specification, containing the requirements that all implementations should follow as well as some implementations for major languages, including an API and a SDK to interact with it.

At this point, we are about to do the real work where we have to configure OpenTelemetry and export telemetry data to New Relic. Exporting this kind of data relies on a specific protocol; the OpenTelemetry Protocol or OTLP.

OpenTelemetry provides instrumentation libraries for your application. The development of these libraries is guided by the OpenTelemetry specification. The OpenTelemetry specification describes the cross-language requirements and design expectations for all OpenTelemetry implementations in various programming languages.

It follows a specification-driven development. The OpenTelemetry specification has design and implementation guidelines for how the instrumentation libraries should be implemented. In addition, it provides client libraries in all the major programming languages which follow the specification.

Today we learned how to manually configure OpenTelemetry for Python to connect to Lightstep (this also works for any Observability back-end that ingests the OTLP format). We also learned how to link related services together through manual context propagation.

According to the opentelemetry specification for messaging systems, When a process receives messages in a batch it is impossible for this process to determine the parent span for the span that it is currently creating.

That's why you have otel logging: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specificatio...

OTLP protocol for shipping telemetry data

Lightstep ingests data in native OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) format, so we will use the OTLP Exporter. The exporter can be called either otlp or follow the naming format otlp/. We could call it otlp/bob if we wanted to. We're calling our exporter otlp/ls to signal to us that we are using the OTLP exporter to send the data to Lightstep.

Lightstep Observability supports the native OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP). It can receive data in the OTLP format either via HTTP or gRPC. You will need to specify which method you wish to use in your code, as we’ll see in the upcoming code snippets.

For monitoring: If you want to go the open source route, the open telemetry ecosystem is booming. You could use the open telemetry java agent along with their collector, and then use Elastic APM, which could give you a good starting point. Here is a small example project I found on github that was fun to play around with and explore the capabilities of a setup like this: https://github.com/riferrei/otel-with-apache-pulsar