Chapter 3: Auto-Instrumentation

The purpose of telemetry is to give people information about systems. This data is used to make informed decisions about ways to improve software and prevent disasters from occurring. In the case of an outage, analytics tools can help us investigate the root cause of the interruption by interpreting telemetry. Once the event has been resolved, the recorded traces, metrics, and logs can be correlated retroactively to gain a complete picture of what happened. In all these cases, the knowledge that's gained from telemetry assists in solving problems, be it future, present, or past, in applications within an organization. Being able to see the code is very rarely the bread and butter of an organization, which sometimes makes conversations about investing in observability difficult. Decision-makers must constantly make tradeoffs regarding where to invest. The upfront cost of instrumenting code can be a deterrent to even getting started, especially if...