Episode 41: OpenTelemetry - with Martin Thwaites
In this episode, I was joined by Martin Thwaites from Honeycomb to chat about OpenTelemetry. OpenTelemetry (or OTel) standardises metrics, logs, and traces - allowing different systems and languages to be able to write telemetry data in a common format and be understood by any visualisation UIs that support it. This is becoming widely adopted, meaning that with minor changes to your applications - you can ship off telemetry to various combinations of providers, giving you much more choice and flexibility. And from a local development point of view - it’s also easy to spin up visualisation tools locally (eg. Jaeger), even if you’re using something different in production. Definitely something I’ll be embracing for all my projects moving forward!
Martin is a Developer Advocate at Honeycomb, o11y enthusiast, and a delivery-focused Developer from the UK. With over 20 years of experience in development in the .NET ecosystem, he’s worked with many companies on scaling up engineering teams and products. The past few years have been spent working on solving complex problems with some of the UK’s big names, including e-commerce retailers and credit lenders.
Martin’s social links
Links from the show
- OpenTelemetry website
- Honeycomb
- Jaeger
- Martin’s blog post about Activity
- Martin’s blog post about Baggage
Devpick links
- Spectre.Console
- Podcast episode with Patrick about Spectre.Console
- My talk on Spectre.Console
- JqPlay:
Giveaway details
The giveaway was for a physical copy of the Observability Engineering O’Reilly book.
To be entered into the giveaway - tweet out about the show using hashtag #UnhandledException; mention @MartinDotNet, @honeycombio, the book, and me (@dracan) - and I’ll randomly pick a winner a couple of weeks after the show goes out.