observability 101 with spring and micrometer
Abstract
Observability is crucial for application engineers as it provides indispensable insights into the performance of applications, enabling effective debugging and ensuring the overall health and reliability of the software.Telemetry data, including logs, metrics, and traces, should be a focal point during application development. It is crucial to instrument applications, making decisions about the data to collect and the tools for display and storage. Currently, OpenTelemetry stands as the standard for observability in cloud-native apps. In this presentation, we will delve into Micrometer, which offers a vendor-neutral method for instrumenting Spring applications. Micrometer is an integral component of Spring 6 and SpringBoot 3, seamlessly compatible with OpenTelemetry. We will take a closer look at the Observation API and explore its practical applications. Lastly, recognizing that the best data is rendered useless without proper analysis, we will examine end tools such as Loki, Jaeger, and Prometheus, which represent telemetry data. The discussion will focus on extracting meaningful insights from the data, catering not only to SREs but to all stakeholders.