OpenTelemetry is widely being touted as the critical factor in enabling organizations to extend visibility of their whole IT estate and, in doing so, to manage and optimise IT availability and performance at all times. In doing so, OpenTelemetry is now attractive to most organisations wanting to meet rising customer demands for brilliant, seamless digital experiences.
But with so much noise gathering around OpenTelemetry, it’s vital for technologists to have a clear understanding of this new open standard for telemetry data and how it can be applied within their IT environments to drive better IT and business results.
Technologists not only need to appreciate the full range of game-changing benefits that OpenTelemetry can deliver; they also need to recognise the limitations of this new approach to monitoring so that they can ensure they have the tools and platforms in place to maximise its full potential.
Here are five essential points that every technologist should know when it comes to OpenTelemetry.
OpenTelemetry is the lingua franca for full-stack telemetry
OpenTelemetry is a holistic telemetry open-source standard for metrics, logs and traces (MLT). It has been adopted and supported by cloud service providers, observability vendors (including AppDynamics) and end-users. OpenTelemetry is open source and therefore available to everyone, with no cost involved.
It’s helpful to think about OpenTelemetry as the lingua franca for full-stack telemetry, generating and collecting data up and down the IT stack to feed an observability platform.
Visibility into every corner of the IT stack
OpenTelemetry generates telemetry data in areas of the IT stack where technologists have previously had very little visibility. Technologists can get real-time visibility once in production by coming out of the box from third party solutions or with just a few lines of code during the development stage. It’s an easy and quick way for technologists to be able to monitor any environment.
For start-up businesses, OpenTelemetry is an agile and cost-effective way to build observability into their IT estate from day one, through APIs and SDKs. While for large enterprises, OpenTelemetry enables technologists to generate data across an increasingly fragmented and complex IT estate. They’re getting visibility into parts of their IT environment that they’ve always struggled to monitor.
As Gartner describes it: OpenTelemetry’s emergence as an open standard for telemetry collection promises improved interoperability and greater observability of microservices, containers and Kubernetes.
Flexibility and choice, beyond vendor lock-ins
OpenTelemetry completely eliminates vendor lock-ins that have been such a barrier for many IT teams in the past. Because with OpenTelemetry, technologists can duplicate performance and availability data and send it to multiple places, whether that is specific tools or an enterprise-level observability solution.
This means that any team, whether that is CloudOps, SRE or ITOps, has the freedom and flexibility to choose the most appropriate tools to make sense of the raw telemetry data it collects.
You still need a way to make sense of the telemetry data
OpenTelemetry is brilliant at collecting individual, isolated pieces and traces and stitching these together, but it doesn’t deliver more holistic insight into performance. Put simply, it’s only concerned with generating data; it doesn’t help IT teams to make sense of the vast volumes of data it creates.
It’s therefore vital for technologists to ensure they have a way to consume, process and correlate the wealth of telemetry data that they generate with OpenTelemetry.
Technologists need to be able to integrate OpenTelemetry data into their full-stack observability solutions, using advanced analytics, Machine Learning and AI to get a consolidated, holistic view on IT performance and availability data. Only with this level of insight are they able to cut through data noise, make informed decisions and prioritise actions based on potential impact to end-user experience and the business.
OpenTelemetry must become a critical component of a wider full-stack observability strategy
Full-stack observability has become a major focus for businesses in every industry. The latest AppDynamics report, The Journey to Observability, revealed that more than half of organizations in the UAE (55 percent) have already started their transition to full-stack observability and a further 38 percent plan to do so during 2022. That means that 93 percent of organisations in the Emirates will be somewhere along the journey to full-stack observability by the end of this year.
Undoubtedly, many technologists are now looking to OpenTelemetry as the key enabler in achieving their goals for full-stack observability over the coming months. They recognise how this open framework can rapidly accelerate their efforts to generate unified, 360-degree visibility right across their IT environments, including on-premise, public cloud and hybrid cloud.
However, in order for OpenTelemetry to deliver on its promise and deliver real value, technologists have to ensure they have the tools in place to turn telemetry data into meaningful and actionable insights. They need to be able to process and integrate telemetry data within their full-stack observability platforms, so that they can get a holistic view on IT performance and digital experience.
Those technologists that succeed in doing this will be perfectly placed to surge ahead with their full-stack observability programs, with the data and insights they need to optimise IT performance and deliver seamless digital experiences at all times.
Erwan Paccard is the director of product marketing at Cisco AppDynamics
