Configuration and Control Plane
In the previous chapters, we learned how to enable auto-instrumentation with a few lines of code and leverage collected telemetry to debug issues and monitor performance. Auto-collected traces and metrics provide the basis for your observability solution, but they are rarely sufficient without an application context. In this chapter, we’ll learn how to customize telemetry collection – enrich, adjust, or control its volume. We will dive into the following topics:
- Controlling costs with sampling
- Enriching and filtering telemetry
- Customizing context propagation
- Building a processing pipeline with the OpenTelemetry Collector
By the end of this chapter, you will be able to choose a sampling strategy and configure it in your system, efficiently enrich auto-generated traces with custom attributes, and propagate your context between services. We’ll see also how to suppress noisy spans and metrics.
