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Open Telemetry Concepts - Primer

A Telemetry Event is equivalent to a Signal in OpenTelemetry specification

In this section we are going to touch upon some of the key concepts of OpenTelemetry specification so that the rest of specification is easier to comprehend. While the following details are a brief summary derived from https://opentelemetry.io/docs/concepts/, we would encourage everyone to go through the original documentation to understand the concepts in detail.

OpenTelemetry specification consists of the following signals:

  1. ${\color{green}TRACE}$ - Traces give us the big picture of what happens when a request is made to an application. Whether your application is a monolith with a single database or a sophisticated mesh of services, traces are essential to understanding the full “path” a request takes in your application.

    ${\color{green}TRACE}$ signal consists of ${\color{green}SPANS}$. A span represents a unit of work or operation. It tracks specific operations that a request makes, painting a picture of what happened during the time in which that operation was executed. A span contains name, time-related data, structured log messages, and other metadata (that is, Attributes) to provide information about the operation it tracks. Following diagram shows how the trace works with various spans enabling distributed tracing.

    otel-signals

  2. ${\color{green}METRIC}$ - A metric is a measurement of a service captured at runtime. The moment of capturing a measurement is known as a metric event, which consists not only of the measurement itself, but also the time at which it was captured and associated metadata. Application and request metrics are important indicators of availability and performance. Custom metrics can provide insights into how availability indicators impact user experience or the business.

  3. ${\color{green}LOG}$ - Logs are textual records that capture specific events, errors, or informational messages generated by an application or system. They become far more useful when they are included as part of a span, or when they are correlated with a trace and a span.