Learn why integrating OTel from Day 1 is crucial for monitoring distributed systems, managing identity and preventing production issues.

The New Stack is a publication covering trends and technologies in cloud-native development, DevOps, and software delivery. Developers can learn about containerization, Kubernetes, and cloud computing, as well as explore topics such as microservices architecture, serverless computing, and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.

The New Stack

OpenTelemetry provides essential monitoring capabilities for distributed systems running on Kubernetes through metrics, logs, and traces. The article explains how to integrate OTel from the start of a project using the OpenTelemetry collector to gather telemetry data from services and infrastructure. It emphasizes building observability into your "walking skeleton" early, alongside identity management and authentication using OAuth2 and SSO solutions like Keycloak or Zitadel. The piece covers core concepts including service behavior monitoring, performance tracking against SLAs, and propagating user identity across distributed services.

How OpenTelemetry Works: Tracing, Metrics and Logs on Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry on Kubernetes: Core Concepts for Platform Engineers

The OpenTelemetry Collector: Ingestion, Processing and Export Patterns