Notes / tag / instrumentation

#instrumentation

15 notes across 2 topics

5 — Label & Attribute Schema Design

Cardinality budget, naming conventions, and the high-churn label traps that turn a cheap metric into a production incident — the design discipline for the labels semantic conventions don't already cover for you.

observability instrumentation opentelemetry book
Jul 17, 2026

1 — OpenTelemetry SDKs & Semantic Conventions

OpenTelemetry is a specification and an API/SDK, not a backend — the pieces that make it up, and the semantic-convention vocabulary that lets two unrelated teams' telemetry be queried the same way.

observability instrumentation opentelemetry book
Jul 17, 2026

4 — Auto vs. Manual Instrumentation

Four ways a span gets created — hand-written, framework-level auto-instrumentation, eBPF, and service-mesh sidecar capture — and the trade-off between code changes and business context each one makes.

observability instrumentation opentelemetry book
Jul 17, 2026

1 — Instrumenting Web APIs

Covers span and metric conventions for HTTP/gRPC API instrumentation — route templating, status code buckets, and latency histograms.

observability instrumentation book

2 — Microservices

Covers instrumenting service-to-service calls consistently enough that a fleet-wide service graph and RED dashboard fall out for free.

observability instrumentation book

3 — Messaging Systems

Covers instrumenting producer/consumer boundaries in queues and streams, where trace context propagation is easiest to get wrong.

observability instrumentation book

4 — Databases

Covers instrumenting query spans and connection-pool metrics without leaking query parameter values as high-cardinality attributes.

observability instrumentation book

5 — Caches

Covers hit/miss/eviction metrics and cache-specific span attributes that distinguish a cache problem from a backing-store problem.

observability instrumentation book

6 — Kubernetes Workloads

Covers instrumenting pods and controllers so workload telemetry correlates cleanly with cluster-level Kubernetes signals.

observability instrumentation book

7 — Serverless

Covers instrumenting cold-start latency and short-lived execution contexts where traditional agent-based collection does not fit.

observability instrumentation book

8 — Batch Jobs

Covers instrumenting long-running, non-request-driven jobs where RED-method dashboards do not directly apply.

observability instrumentation book

9 — Background Workers

Covers instrumenting queue-consumer worker pools — backlog depth, processing latency, and retry/dead-letter visibility.

observability instrumentation book