Summary

One of the many jobs of software engineers today includes evaluating the new technology and tools that are available to determine whether these tools would improve their ability to accomplish their goals. Leveraging auto-instrumentation, in-code configuration, and the OpenTelemetry Collector, we quickly sent data from one backend to another to help us compare these tools.

All the tools we've discussed in this chapter take much more than a few pages to become familiar with. Entire books have been written about running these in production, and the skills to do so well at scale require practice and experience. Understanding some areas that need additional thinking when those tools are deployed allows us to uncover some of the unknowns.

Looking through the different tools and starting to see how each one provides functionality to visualize the data gave us a sense of how telemetry data can be used to start answering questions about our systems. In the next chapter, we...