How OpenTelemetry Can Serve as Observability’s Missing On-Ramp

By B. Cameron Gain

The use of observability tools and techniques to gain insights into how applications perform has become more critical as infrastructure becomes ever more complex. As organizations increasingly deploy their applications on a patchwork of multicloud and on-premises infrastructures, observability offers visibility into how applications are not only running but how they are changing and how they are interacting. Observability can also help to detect potential problem areas that drill down into gauging the effects on each user’s individual experience.But like any technology many organizations are keen to adopt, impediments exist for observability’s adoption. Tracing, metrics and logs, for example, are often confused with observability, instead of the data sources as the raw material needed to extract the insights enabled through observability.