Setup
Prerequisites
The ServiceNow Cloud Observability platform combines tracing, metric and log data to gain full observability into your system in one tool. Your dashboards and alerts will not only show you when there’s a problem, they become actionable tools that find the source of that problem for you. Changes in system behavior are mapped automatically to changes across service boundaries. You don’t need to know the dependencies in your system, Cloud Observability understands them and can find the issues deep in your stack.
Before we start instrumenting code and sending data to Cloud Observability, we must ensure a few prerequisites are met:
Sign up for a free account
You will need a Cloud Observability account to send OpenTelemetry data to for this workshop. Cloud Observability offers a free Community Tier account. If you don’t already have an account, you can sign up here.
If you don’t get the confirmation email after signing up for an account, please check your Spam folders
Use Your Favorite IDE or Editor
You can use any IDE or editor that your prefer. If you don’t have one yet, we recommend using Visual Studio Code
Download Workshop Files
We have created a simple JavaScript application that you will instrument with OpenTelemetry. Clone the git repo or download the files here
git clone https://github.com/lightstep/nodejs-microservices-example-app.git
You can view the completed workshop files by changing to the tracing-complete branch. Use this as a reference if you get stuck anywhere during the workshop.
Install Docker Desktop
This workshop uses Docker to run the microservices on your machine. Click here to download and install Docker Desktop if you have not already done so.
Now that you are all setup, let’s start instrumenting!
next: Instrumenting Your Services