Peering Inside the Black Box: A Case for Observability

Track: Cloud Native Platforms

As we increase our adoption of microservice architectures and cloud, our ability to see inside our services becomes increasingly important. With more moving parts, there are more places where problems can occur and we can no longer simply login to the host to investigate. Providing observability into our applications is crucial, not only to the successful adoption of microservice patterns but also to cloud adoption.

This session will look at the emergence of OpenTelemetry as the standard for observability and the impact this will have on the applications we write.

I’ll look at the work being done to simplify the adoption of OpenTelemetry, particularly within the Spring framework, and discuss approaches for isolating the application code from the details of the underlying observability implementation.

Finally, I’ll show examples of using Open Telemetry to ‘peer inside’ Spring applications to show what information is available and how we can use this information to understand their behavior.