OpenTelemetry Certified Associate (OTCA) emerges
As anticipated and expected, the news wires at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America positively cackled this week as the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and its guest list of some 800 partner organisations took to the snowy streets of Salt Lake City to proffer their wares.
Among the news items that had to stick were updates related to OpenTelemetry (also known as Otel), an open source observability framework with tools, libraries, APIs and SDKs for collecting, processing and exporting telemetry data such as traces, metrics and logs to backend systems.
This technology is designed to help developers monitor and evaluate the performance and health of cloud-native applications, which can be distributed across complex infrastructures. OTel was accepted to CNCF on May 7, 2019 and moved to the “incubating” maturity level on August 26, 2021.
Otel is now the second most active CNCF project after Kubernetes.
Why use OpenTelemetry?
OTel brings a unified, community-supported framework for capturing observability data that supports distributed tracing i.e. it collects traces to show the journey of a request across various services and components. It also gathers data on application and infrastructure performance, allowing users to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) in real-time.
The platform here simplifies logging to make it easier to link logs to traces for faster issue resolution. Plus, it promises to help avoid vendor lock-in with a universal, open standard so that it can export data to any backend that supports it and is compatible across over 40 different observability and monitoring tools.
OpenTelemetry Certified Associate (OTCA)
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the Linux Foundation Education have announced the launch of the OpenTelemetry Certified Associate (OTCA) certification. The certification promises to help application engineers, DevOps engineers, system reliability engineers, platform engineers or any IT professional interested in building their skills in OpenTelemetry.
OpenTelemetry certification provides benefits to professionals in cloud-native and observability roles. The CNCF says that certification will validate essential skills in setting up and using OpenTelemetry to monitor distributed systems, covering trace, metric and log collection, which aids in troubleshooting and optimising performance.
Certification also gives professionals a competitive edge in acquiring or progressing in DevOps, SRE and cloud engineering roles by demonstrating expertise in this now widely adopted observability tool.
“Modern cloud native systems can be complex to manage if an organisation lacks the necessary telemetry data and visibility into their varied layers,” says Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF. “OpenTelemetry has come a long way to mature open source telemetry technology and specifications to benefit all. Our new OpenTelemetry certification supports our goal of educating and promoting best practices for cloud-native observability.”
Pleasing platform engineers
OpenTelemetry simplifies observability and enables better visibility into the complex, distributed systems of cloud-native and microservices-based applications.
“OpenTelemetry is quickly becoming a ‘must-have’ component of cloud-native and this certification is a great way for developers to demonstrate their mastery. We’re excited to launch this program with CNCF and anticipate it to be just the first step in learning programs that we build together,” says Austin Parker, OpenTelemetry governance committee and director of open source at Honeycomb.
This enumerated list covers the core benefits of OpenTelemetry:
- Observability Across Systems: OTel collects and correlates traces, metrics and logs from across the stack to provide a unified view that makes it easier to diagnose issues, monitor application health and ensure system reliability across an entire platform.
- Proactive Incident Response and Minimised Downtime: Otel captures distributed traces that map out the flow of requests across microservices, allowing engineers to understand and troubleshoot issues quickly with faster insights to help teams respond to anomalies faster.
- Automated Alerts and Real-Time Data: With Otel, engineers can set up alerts based on real-time performance data, triggering scaling or rollbacks when issues arise – an essential function for large-scale systems.
- Improved Developer Experience and Cross-Team Collaboration: Otel allows engineers to offer developers seamless instrumentation options, making it easier to track issues across microservices without custom observability code. This enhances the platform’s reliability and fosters a collaborative DevOps culture.
- Scalability and Flexibility: OpenTelemetry is designed for cloud-native and distributed architectures, so it scales well across clusters and handles the demands of containerised environments.
- Resource Management and Cost Effectiveness: Rich telemetry data gives insight into resource usage patterns, making it easier to optimise infrastructure costs and performance.
