Visibility into System Operations with OpenTelemetry & Confluent

Observability is the process of collecting data from various endpoints and services to measure a system’s internal state. It comes from aggregating and correlating the telemetry data (logs, metrics, and traces) coming from:

• Hardware
• Software
• Cloud infrastructure components, like containers
• Open-source tool
• Microservices

This instrumented data is then sent to the Observability backend for analysis.

Although Observability and Monitoring are used interchangeably, there is a notable difference between them. While Monitoring typically involves tracking metrics such as CPU usage, memory consumption, and network traffic, Observability extends beyond these surface-level indicators. It emphasizes capturing detailed telemetry data, including logs, traces, and metrics, to provide a holistic view of system performance and behavior. Monitoring tends to be more reactive, while Observability enables proactive problem-solving by facilitating deeper insights into system dynamics and facilitating root cause analysis.

OpenTelemetry is an open-source Observability framework that standardizes the collection and analysis of telemetry data such as traces, metrics and logs across diverse software environments. It provides a unified approach to Observability by supporting multiple programming languages, frameworks, and platforms.

It is vendor and tool-agnostic and can be easily used with Observability backends such as Jaeger, Prometheus and other commercial offerings. OpenTelemetry helps to instrument applications or systems regardless of their language, infrastructure, or runtime environment.

At Persistent Systems, Observability is a top priority, and we have built a comprehensive solution called – Magnify – around OpenTelemetry and other open-source technologies to offer visibility into an organization’s systems operations.