Learning OpenTelemetry: Setting Up and Operating a Modern Observability System

Useful observability starts with more than collecting data: teams need signals that can be connected and understood across applications and infrastructure. Learning OpenTelemetry shows how the framework’s components work together, then follows the path from instrumentation choices to operating telemetry pipelines and rolling out observability across an organization.

Make sense of the signals

The opening chapters set out the challenges of modern production monitoring and introduce the core observability signals: traces, metrics, and logs. The book also explains context, attributes, resources, semantic conventions, and the OpenTelemetry Protocol—the connective ideas that help make telemetry more consistent and correlated.

See how the pieces fit together

Rather than treating OpenTelemetry as a single tool, the authors walk through its architecture, including APIs, SDKs, library instrumentation, infrastructure telemetry, and collectors. A hands-on demo provides a practical setting for considering how those pieces support application performance investigation and telemetry workflows.

From instrumentation to operations

Practical chapters cover setting up providers, attaching resources, instrumenting application code, and supporting native instrumentation in shared libraries and services. The discussion then extends to cloud providers, containers, Kubernetes, serverless platforms, and asynchronous systems.

Design pipelines with care

Readers explore pipeline topologies and operational decisions such as filtering, sampling, transforming and scrubbing data, buffering, security, privacy, and telemetry costs. The final rollout chapter considers different approaches to observability across teams and organizations, with a checklist to help structure implementation.

Who may find it useful

This guide is aimed at application developers, open source maintainers, operators, infrastructure teams, and technical managers working with observability or planning an OpenTelemetry adoption. Its broad view is especially relevant when instrumentation, collection, and organization-wide practices need to be considered together.