Gregg Ostrowski, CTO Advisor at Cisco AppDynamics, discusses the expertise organizations have to optimize software availability and efficiency, why IT groups should flip uncooked telemetry knowledge into actionable perception and undertake a hybrid technique that integrates cloud-native and on-premise observability.
OpenTelemetry adoption is rising quickly as IT groups look to drive visibility into cloud-native purposes and underlying infrastructure. In truth, most CIOs I discuss to inform me they anticipate their group to be utilizing OpenTelemetry inside the subsequent two years.
OpenTelemetry is a holistic open-source telemetry customary for metrics and traces with the expectation of additionally supporting logs. It has been adopted and supported by cloud service suppliers, observability suppliers (together with Cisco AppDynamics), and finish customers. Utilizing OpenTelemetry, with just some strains of code throughout the growth part, firms can get real-time knowledge about software efficiency as soon as in manufacturing. OpenTelemetry offers open customary instruments for robotically instrumenting purposes in-built microservices and Kubernetes environments and simple methods to connect with the CI/CD pipeline.
Already, we’re seeing start-ups adopting OpenTelemetry as an agile and cost-effective approach to construct IT observability from day one by APIs and SDKs. And inside bigger enterprises, OpenTelemetry allows technologists to generate availability and efficiency knowledge in more and more fragmented and sophisticated purposes. They acquire visibility into components of their IT setting that they merely couldn’t see by their conventional agent-based monitoring instruments.
OpenTelemetry is the inspiration of efficiency in cloud native environments
As IT departments face fixed strain to innovate at pace, technologists are benefiting from no-code and low-code platforms to speed up launch pace. They acknowledge the pliability and scale that cloud-native applied sciences present.
However this variation dramatically will increase the complexity of software topologies, organizations deploying 1000’s of microservices and containers. Merely put, in case you have a single software working on premise and need to convey that software right into a cloud-native construct, it’s worthwhile to cut up the applying into separate entities. That software will then run as a cloud-native software primarily based on microservices. So you’ve got immediately gone from instrumenting one software to instrumenting 10, 12, or 20 totally different microservices. And these microservices generate an enormous quantity of information each second.
This is the reason OpenTelemetry is so important, offering visibility into fashionable IT environments, on the software stage, and into supporting digital companies (akin to Kubernetes). With out it, technologists don’t have any approach to establish and repair efficiency points earlier than they have an effect on the end-user expertise.
IT groups want to show uncooked telemetry knowledge into actionable data
Nonetheless, it’s important for technologists to make sure they’ve a approach to eat, course of and correlate the mass of telemetry knowledge they may now generate. OpenTelemetry is nice at amassing and aggregating particular person, remoted knowledge, however it would not present a extra holistic view of efficiency. Merely put, it is just involved with producing knowledge; it would not assist technologists perceive the big volumes of information they create.
By itself, it’s extremely onerous for IT groups to get any substantial worth out of OpenTelemetry as a result of it is so verbose, producing huge volumes of information and making it tough to see the entire software image. That is the place IT groups want extra instruments to boost the info they get from OpenTelemetry and mix it with different knowledge factors they get by brokers and knowledge coming from public cloud environments like Kubernetes.
Certainly, for all its strengths, OpenTelemetry merely doesn’t present the identical stage of visibility as a proprietary agent into on-premise environments. With OpenTelemetry, IT groups solely obtain traces and metrics.
Organizations have to correlate OpenTelemetry knowledge with enterprise transactions to optimize digital experiences
Critically, OpenTelemetry doesn’t perceive enterprise transactions, so IT groups want an observability platform that may extract enterprise transactions from OpenTelemtry knowledge whereas traversing agent-based monitoring in on-premise environments.
Many IT groups deploy separate instruments to watch cloud-native and legacy purposes, and this implies they need to run in a split-screen mode and not using a clear line of sight of the complete software path, the place software parts run domestically and cloud native environments.
This makes it extremely tough for IT groups to rapidly troubleshoot points and drives up metrics like MTTR and MTTX. Not solely that, however the lack of ability to derive enterprise context into the general software stream makes it unimaginable for organizations to validate their investments in cloud applied sciences, which turns into more and more necessary as organizations search operational efficiencies.
Due to this fact, IT groups should have the ability to ingest OpenTelemetry straight into their unified observability platform, scale back knowledge noise, make knowledgeable selections, and prioritize actions primarily based on potential impression on end-user expertise and the enterprise.
IT groups should undertake a hybrid technique that integrates cloud-native and on-premise observability
Whereas cloud native applied sciences are undoubtedly the way forward for computing, the transition will take time. We already see firms are slowing their cloud migration packages resulting from rising prices and a backdrop of financial uncertainty. Most organizations will proceed to run most of their IT on premise. And they also want a hybrid technique the place they mesh OpenTelemetry into the worldwide mixture of purposes already instrumented by conventional agent-based monitoring methods.
IT groups want an observability platform that gives the pliability to scale to each cloud-native and on-premise environments – OpenTelemetry and agent-based entities being ingested into the identical platform. Solely with unified visibility and insights will applied sciences have the ability to reduce by complexity and optimize software availability and efficiency always.
