Now that you have your code instrumented, we need to send that trace data to a backend in order to more effectively analyze data and understand the true state of your system. The recommended approach to achieve this is to use an OpenTelemetry Collector and configure it for your preferred backend, for example ServiceNow Cloud Observability.
The OpenTelemetry Collector provides a vendor-agnostic solution for receiving, processing and exporting telemetry data. The Collector is made up of the following components:
These components are enabled through pipelines. You can define multiple instances of these components as well as the pipelines via YAML configuration.
ServiceNow Cloud Observability is the cloud-native reliability platform that provides monitoring, observability, and incident response for the world’s most reliable systems. Cloud Observability co-founded OpenTelemetry (and OpenTracing) to give developers access to portable, vendor-neutral telemetry data. The Cloud Observability platform provides unified observability at enterprise scale enabling organizations to understand and resolve complex issues across any number of services, platforms, languages, or teams. Reveal hidden dependencies, including 3rd-party APIs and cloud services, and pinpoint exactly where, why, and how incidents occur.
Let’s update our application to use an OpenTelemetry Collector. After that, we will configure the collector to export data to Cloud Observability.
next: OpenTelemetry Collector