Unified Observability Through Open Standards and Distributed Tracing

"Unified observability signifies the possession of one consistent view over all the parts of a distributed system - applications, infrastructure, and services. With modern systems being spread over several clouds, microservices, and APIs, the only way to have such visibility is through open standards and distributed tracing. Standards such as OpenTelemetry not only make it easier to collect but also to correlate the telemetry data (logs, metrics, and traces) from various components."

"According to the Grafana Labs Observability Survey, 85% of respondents reported investing in OpenTelemetry. Distributed tracing is an excellent counterpart that illustrates the journey of a single request through multiple services, thereby enabling engineers to quickly identify the areas where performance is being hampered as well as where errors are occurring. In this article, we will learn how unified observability is made possible with the use of open standards, more specifically, OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, and their deployment in AWS."

Unified observability provides a single, consistent view across applications, infrastructure, and services to trace requests through highly distributed microservices and multi-cloud environments. Open standards, especially OpenTelemetry, enable collection and correlation of logs, metrics, and traces from diverse languages, frameworks, and providers, reducing vendor lock-in. Distributed tracing visualizes the path of individual requests across services, allowing rapid identification of performance bottlenecks and error sources. Traditional monitoring that captures isolated metrics is insufficient for modern cloud-native systems. Deploying OpenTelemetry and distributed tracing on cloud platforms like AWS allows organizations to harmonize observability stacks and streamline incident diagnosis and remediation.

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