Practical OpenTelemetry
A 12-part, hands-on field guide to Practical OpenTelemetry by Daniel Gomez Blanco — the why, the how, and the roll-out of the OpenTelemetry standard, with original diagrams.
All Parts
Practical OpenTelemetry — Part 1: The Five Clocks Inside Your MTTR
Your MTTR hides five separate clocks — the industry spent 20 years optimizing the wrong one. Why monitoring and observability aren't the same thing.
Practical OpenTelemetry — Part 2: Open Standards and the Vendor Shift
Instrument once, export everywhere: how OpenTelemetry merged two competing projects into one standard and changed what vendors actually sell.
Practical OpenTelemetry — Part 3: The Spec, Signals, and Stability
Traces, metrics, logs, and baggage — plus the API/SDK split and semantic conventions that make OpenTelemetry a standard instead of just another library.
Practical OpenTelemetry — Part 4: Auto-Instrumentation, Zero Code Changes
The fastest path to OpenTelemetry: attach an agent, get 122 libraries instrumented — zero code changes. When to customize it, when to turn it off.
Practical OpenTelemetry — Part 5: Context, Baggage, and Propagators
Traces span services — but who carries context between them? How OTel's Context API, Baggage, and propagators turn isolated telemetry into one story.
Practical OpenTelemetry — Part 6: Tracing: Supercharged Structured Logs
Spans, span kinds, async causality, and why fire-and-forget tasks silently corrupt your traces. The tracing chapter of Practical OpenTelemetry, with diagrams.
Practical OpenTelemetry — Part 7: Metrics and Cardinality
Six instrument types, five aggregation strategies, and the cardinality mistakes that make metric backends fall over — OTel's metrics API, explained.
Practical OpenTelemetry — Part 8: Logging: Enrich, Don't Replace
OTel doesn't replace your logging framework — it contextualizes it. Why the Logs API is experimental, and how trace IDs get into logs you already have.
Practical OpenTelemetry — Part 9: The Collector and OTLP
Receivers, processors, exporters, pipelines — how the Collector became observability's universal plumbing, and the OTLP protocol underneath it.
Practical OpenTelemetry — Part 10: Sampling and Deployment Models
Head-based, consistent-probability, and tail-based sampling — three strategies with real math — plus the four places a Collector can physically live.
Practical OpenTelemetry — Part 11: Minimizing Adoption Friction
Where to start an OpenTelemetry rollout, how to migrate off OpenTracing without breaking the chain, and why auto-instrumentation always wins by default.
Practical OpenTelemetry — Part 12: Adopting Observability
The effectiveness test for observability, why postmortems should measure MTTK, and the book's closing philosophy: enablement over control.