Open Telemetry: Under The Hood

OpenTelemetry is intended to instrument your application or system regardless of language, infrastructure, or runtime environment. Different programming languages and infrastructure service providers may have their own unique implementation but the manner of sending and the format of data always complies with the OpenTelemetry specification. In this post we’re going to talk about the OpenTelemetry components and illustrate where the Netreo OTel Appliance and Retrace fall in the OpenTelemetry big picture.

OpenTelemetry is now widely supported in different programming languages and cloud service providers. The goal is to be able to instrument application and infrastructure and correlate data for monitoring, analysis and troubleshooting. To be able to correlate instrumentation data OpenTelemetry uses the concept of Context Propagation. Context Propagation is the key to enabling monitoring of distributed applications by using an ID to link related traces even those running in different services.

OpenTelemetry supports 2 ways of sending data to the backend:

1. Direct sending of data to the backend
2. Sending of data to a collector

For small projects, the first approach normally works but for big projects the second approach which uses a collector is more appropriate because it enables fast data capture with lower risk of data loss. With a collector a service can just forward traces without any processing. The collector can also handle sending of data by batch and retry if a connection interruption occurs. If any processing or formatting is required, it can also be done in the collector. The Netreo OTel Appliance is an OpenTelemetry collector which can be created and hosted in your own network. You can point all your OpenTelemetry services to it so that all telemetry data can be dumped to the Netreo OTel Appliance. The Netreo OTel Appliance in turn does the processing and formatting of data before sending it to Retrace. Since you have full control of Netreo OTel Appliance, you can also create custom processing and send telemetry data to a tool of your choice.

Application-level instrumentation can be enabled and infrastructure service provider specific distributions can be used to forward all telemetry data to Netreo OTel Appliance.