In this guide we covered how to configure Istio with OpenTelemetry to make your microservice architectures observable without heavy lifting. We introduced the OpenTelemetry Collector and reviewed the traces in ServiceNow Cloud Observability. We also learned about options to fine-tune the telemetry data. To continue enhancing this solution there are a couple recommended next steps: instrument your services with OpenTelemetry, and configure Istio to capture and send metrics to Cloud Observability. We’ll talk briefly about instrumenting your services below and you can find information on Istio metrics and other topics in the additional resources section at the end.
Configuring Istio with OpenTelemetry and ServiceNow Cloud Observability is a great way to get meaningful and actionable telemetry data with a low barrier to entry. To further enhance the fidelity of the data and the coverage of your system you should instrument your services with OpenTelemetry. This will capture data at the service and operation levels helping you better understand the health and performance of your applications and infrastructure. It also provides more granular data helping you more efficiently and effectively triage and resolve issues and respond to incidents.
The OpenTelemetry community provides documentation and libraries for instrumenting your code. Support is available for most of the popular languages including JavaScript, Python, Go, Java, Dotnet and more. In many cases there are auto-instrumentation solutions which simply require importing a package or agent and minor configuration. There are also manual instrumentation options that provide fine-grain control on how and what tracing data you capture. The best practice is to use the auto-instrumentation whenever possible and then rely on manual instrumentation to further enhance what the auto-instrumentation provides.
To further your journey with Istio, OpenTelemetry and Cloud Observability, take a look at some of these resources: