OTel Appliance - Put your serverless and containerized apps on Retrace

Telemetry has long been employed in various systems, from embedded systems and hardware interfaces to business applications. However, as architectures became more complex, traditional telemetry approaches became less effective, particularly with the emergence of distributed systems and microservices architecture. These challenges prompted the creation of the OpenTelemetry project by Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

OpenTelemetry is now available in Retrace with the introduction of the Netreo OTel Appliance. Retrace and the OTel Appliance monitor applications hosted in the cloud, serverless and container environments, without running the Retrace agent within the instance itself. With Retrace and the OTel Appliance, capturing application traces and logs is easy in AWS Lambda, AWS ECS, AWS EKS, Azure Functions, Azure App Services, Azure Kubernetes Services, Azure Container Instances and other cloud-native services (s1.stackify.com).

For languages which don’t support OpenTelemetry automatic instrumentation, manual instrumentation can be enabled by importing the OpenTelemetry API and SDK, which can be used to generate application-specific data such as custom logs or errors. Netreo OTel Appliance architecture has maintained the ‘stitch’ between errors, logs and traces as with our Retrace Agent.

Fig 1: Traces, logs and error stitch maintained with Retrace Agent and OTel Appliance

OpenTelemetry is natively supported by popular cloud service providers (i.e., AWS, Azure, and GCP). This means that these cloud platforms can send environment and platform telemetry data. On the application level, if a programming language supports automatic OpenTelemetry instrumentation, it can generate telemetry data out of the box. Automatic instrumentation is analogous to what the Retrace agent can collect without code modification.

The Netreo OTel Appliance is a vendor-agnostic implementation of how to receive, process and export telemetry data. See Netreo OTel Appliance reference for more details.

Aside from the benefits for cloud hosted applications, on-premise hosted and mixed cloud and on-premise hosted applications can also benefit from this added OpenTelemetry support by enabling automatic or manual OpenTelemetry instrumentation.

Start your journey to support modern cloud services today. See it for yourself in our Sandbox, contact us for a quick demo or see how easy it is to set up by following the instructions here.