How To Troubleshoot and Monitor Applications using OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry is a free, open-source Observability Protocol. It sits at the application layer and exports Traces, Metrics, and Logs to a backend for observing. This tutorial is geared towards beginner/intermediate Python developers with minimal experience in Requests and Flask. No OpenTelemetry experience is needed. This is an introduction to OpenTelemetry, covering instrumenting your first application, viewing traces and metrics, and optionally deploying a Jaeger instance locally using Docker. Understanding Traces, Metrics, and Logs as the three pillars of observability is important for monitoring Production environments.

This tutorial covers manual and contrib instrumentation for Python applications using OpenTelemetry. It demonstrates how to set up and send telemetry data to backends like Jaeger, Zipkin, and Prometheus.