Summary

With auto-instrumentation, it's possible to reduce the time that's required to instrument an existing application. Reducing the friction to get started with telemetry gives users a chance to try it before investing significant amounts of time in manual instrumentation. And although the data that's generated via auto-instrumentation is likely not enough to get to the bottom of issues in complex systems, it's a solid starting point. Auto-instrumentation can also be quite useful when you're instrumenting an unfamiliar system.

The use of instrumentation libraries allows users to gain insight into what the libraries they're using are doing, without having to learn the ins and outs of them. The OpenTelemetry libraries that are available at the time of writing can be used to instrument existing code by following the online documentation that's been made available by each language. As we'll learn in Chapter 7, Instrumentation Libraries, using...