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2021-04-05

Designing Google o11y systems

In Designing Google’s Tracing and Metrics Systems: “My Regrets” Lightstep's Ben Sigelman reflects on his past experiences and lessons learned.

OTEL updates

Lots of stuff happening in OTEL, the two things that stood out for me this week were OpenTelemetry Python tracing API/SDK releasing version 1.0 (by Matthew McCleary) and the collector Helm charts, a convenient way to use OTEL on Kubernetes.

Send AWS metrics to partners

Jeff Barr's article CloudWatch Metric Streams – Send AWS Metrics to Partners and to Your Apps in Real Time is a good read.

Intro to exemplars

What a wonderful post by Richi Hartmann of Grafana Labs: Intro to exemplars, which enable Grafana Tempo’s distributed tracing at massive scale. If you're new to the concept: exemplars are a mechanism to connect metrics and logs to (distributed) traces.

Observability data management

A 'new' player is in town: Cribl. For general considerations, check out the TNS article Grappling with Observability Data Management by their CEO Clint Sharp and when you're done have a look at Cribl AppScope, a new approach to black-box instrumentation they offer.

Tracing Lambda with OTEL

Tracing AWS Lambda functions in AWS X-Ray with OpenTelemetry by Manish Dhawaria is an interesting and fun read. Well done!

Kubernetes Atlanta Meetup

The recoding of the most recent Kubernetes Atlanta Meetup is now available online. While it clocks in at 1 hour 45 minutes, it spends most of the time on o11y topics so don't miss out Austin Parker and Joe Searcy talking and showing off OTEL in action.

Introduction to Tracing

Introduction to Tracing: OpenTelemetry & OpenTracing is a 23 minutes video by That DevOps Guy aka Marceld Dempers, providing a nice hands-on intro to the tracing topic, including instrumentation and exploring the resulting traces in Jaeger.


That was it for this edition of the o11y newsletter. Feel free to share news items with me via Twitter—DMs are open if you like to share something in private. Stay safe and hope to see you around next week!