Tag Archives: Cortex

Nurturing Observability with Open Source

Observability means collecting, analyzing and observing data from systems and applications through traces, metrics and logs. OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Jaeger and FluentD represent the latest generations of observability frameworks and tools. OpenTelemetry combines previous open source projects, OpenCensus and OpenTracing, into one standard implementation. Prometheus is an open source solution for monitoring metrics. Jaeger is an open source solution for distributed trace monitoring and is useful for root cause analysis. FluentD is a popular open source solution for log collection and structuring.

While these projects may seem new, there are significant similarities between today’s solutions for observability and older solutions for monitoring data networks. The workflow is still the same – produce the data, gather the data, analyze the data and finally understand the data. The old solutions used proprietary products. Today open source is replacing all of the earlier solutions.

In my current role, I’m leading the development of projects that impact OpenTelemetry metrics and logging APIs and SDKs. The APIs and SDKs are for C++, Go, JavaScript and other languages. You can read more about the C++ metrics API and SDK in this post. I’m also leading several projects for contributing to Prometheus and Cortex. Here are a couple of posts.

Building a C++ Prometheus Exporter for OpenTelemetry

Testing the OpenTelemetry C++ Prometheus Exporter

It’s a great time to be working on OpenTelemetry! Stay tuned for more observability project updates.