Backend options for analyzing telemetry data
The world of observability contains an abundance of tools to provide you with insights into what systems are doing. Within OpenTelemetry, a backend is the destination of the telemetry data and is where it is stored and analyzed. All the telemetry backends that we will explore in this chapter provide the following:
- A destination for the telemetry data. This is usually in the form of a network endpoint, but not always.
- Storage for the telemetry data. The retention period that's supported by the storage is determined by the size of the storage and the amount of data being stored.
- Visualization tooling for the data. All the tools we'll use provide a web interface for displaying and querying telemetry data.
In OpenTelemetry, applications connect to backends via exporters, two of which we've already configured: the console exporter and the OTLP exporter. Each application can be configured to send data directly...
