It took me a while to figure out what observability was all about. A year or two I asked around and my colleagues told me that I needed to follow Charity Majors and to read her blog (done, and done). Just this week, Charity tweeted:

Kislay’s tweet led to his blog post, Observing is not Debugging, which I found very helpful. As Charity noted, Kislay tells us that Observability is a study of the system in motion.

Today’s large-scale distributed applications and systems are effectively always in motion. Whether serving web requests, processing streams of data or handling events, something is always happening. At world-scale, looking at individual requests or events is not always feasible. Instead, it is necessary to take a statistical approach and to watch how well a system is working, instead of simply waiting for a total failure.

New AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry

Today we are launching a preview of AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry. We are part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)’s OpenTelemetry community, working to define an open standard for the collection of distributed traces and metrics. AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry is a secure and supported distribution of the APIs, libraries, agents, and collectors defined in the OpenTelemetry Specification.

One of the coolest features of the toolkit is auto instrumentation. Starting with Java and in the works for other languages and environments (.NET and JavaScript are next), the auto-instrumentation agent identifies the frameworks and languages used by your application and automatically instruments them to collect and forward metrics and traces.

#launch #news #open source