- Hi.
I'm Lavanya Chockalingam.
I'm a Product Marketing Manager at New Relic.
And I'm here to talk to you about OpenTelemetry,
and how to get started using OpenTelemetry.
With emerging technologies and processes,
as a developer, you probably have a big challenge
finding the right instrumentation option
for your application.
You could use one of the proprietary agents.
But if you don't wanna be locked into the agent's vendor,
you could use one of the open solutions,
like OpenCensus or OpenTracing.
All of these options make it difficult
for a developer like you
to decide which one is right for your application,
as well as be confident that what works today
will also work tomorrow.
This is why vendor-neutral open standards matter.
OpenTelemetry, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project
formed by merging OpenTracing and OpenCensus
offers exactly that.
OpenTelemetry holds a single set of APIs and libraries
that standardize how we collect telemetry data,
and send it to a backend of your choice.
This provides you a vendor-neutral path to instrumentation,
as well as gives you the flexibility
to change your backend
without having to instrument your code again.
The OpenTelemetry project
comprises of Specifications, APIs, SDKs,
Exporters and a Collector.
Specifications drive consistency
across the various projects.
The API contains interfaces
and implementations based on the specifications.
The SDKs are reference implementations of the API.
The Exporters enable you to send the telemetry data
to a backend of your choice.
And finally, the Collector provides
a vendor agnostic implementation for processing
and exporting your telemetry data.
Each of the API and SDK
come with a quick-start guide
that shows you how we can instrument your code
to select telemetry data.
For example, if you look at the Java quick-start guide,
it shows you how we can acquire a tracer,
how we can create span, add attributes,
and propagate context across the spans.
Once you've instrumented your code
using the OpenTelemetry API,
you can then start sending telemetry data
to an observability platform like New Relic,
using one of the pre-built exporters
that is available in the OpenTelemetry registry.
Traces are just one form of telemetry data
that you can collect using OpenTelemetry.
To achieve observability,
as you know,
you also need metrics and logs.
Though the specifications of some of these
are still under development,
the ultimate goal of OpenTelemetry
is you have all these telemetry data types
built into frameworks and libraries
so you don't have to instrument your code.
OpenTelemetry is in beta phase today,
and it's a good time
to start exploring it for your new projects.
There is a BasicExample.java
under the New Relic Exporter page
that shows you
how we can instrument your code,
and start sending metrics and traces to New Relic.
This is a good place to get started.
To learn more about OpenTelemetry
or any of the other open source projects New Relic
is contributing to or integrating with,
go to opensource.newrelic.com.
Thanks.