Is OpenTelemetry a Passing Trend or Does it Represent the Future of Observability?

Earlier this year Gartner published a report discussing OpenTelemetry and its place in enhancing Application Performance Monitoring (APM). In the report, author and analyst Mrudula Bangera says that, “OpenTelemetry itself is not an observability product.” But, that “it enables the IT teams to observe the system and application behavior and address any performance issues.” At Mezmo we see immense value in the future of OpenTelemetry and open standards in general for providing better visibility and actionability across development, operations, and security. That’s why we recently announced the Mezmo Exporter for OpenTelemetry. This is the first step in our continued work with the project and will further simplify the ingestion of log data and enrich it with key OpenTelemetry attributes.

What is OpenTelemetry?

OpenTelemetry is an open source and Cloud Native Computing Foundation incubating project created from a merger between the OpenTracing and OpenCencus projects. OpenTelemetry provides a standard set of vendor-agnostic tools, APIs, and SDKs to export telemetry data including logs, metrics, and traces. Traditionally, telemetry data comes from open source and proprietary solutions in multiple formats. Since this data isn’t in a standard format, it can require engineers to use multiple ingestion methods and is hard to query and visualize unless it’s parsed. 

The Gartner report outlines some of the main Use Cases of OpenTelemetry, including, “poorly performing code on API” for the back end and, “real user monitoring (RUM)” for the front end. For the full list of Use Cases identified by Gartner, download the full report.

The Mezmo Exporter for OpenTelemetry

The Mezmo’s Exporter for OpenTelemetry makes it possible to ingest logs from multiple sources including application logs, Kubernetes logs, syslogs, or Windows Event Logs, using a single collector. The data can be enriched at ingestion, making correlating logs across many different services on Mezmo a simple search command. 

Now developers can get the information they need to identify and resolve issues faster within the Mezmo user interface (UI). Instead of forcing them to search across disparate systems to find all relevant information for troubleshooting, developers can now tag logs ingested via the exporter with additional attributes such as trace.id, span.id, metadata from a cloud environment, application data, and more. This feature allows Mezmo’s powerful search capabilities to filter ingested logs by several attributes, allowing developers to spend less time searching and more time resolving critical issues. 

To install the Mezmo Exporter for OpenTelemetry and start seeing more context in your log data, visit the GitHub Repository here, and visit Mezmo’s documentation. Our product and engineering teams are working with customers to understand and build upon our support for OpenTelemetry. If you have an interesting Use Case or want to learn more, reach out at outreach@mezmo.com to speak to an expert.

To read the full Gartner Quick Answer: How Can OpenTelemetry Enhance Application Performance Monitoring? click here. 

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Attribution and disclaimer:

Gartner, Quick Answer: How Can OpenTelemetry Enhance Application Performance Monitoring?, Mrudula Bangera, 24 January 2022.

Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.