OpenTelemetry & Modern Observability: Instrument, Monitor, Trace, and Debug Cloud-Native Applications and Distributed Systems

By James Morris

Modern software doesn't run on one server anymore - it runs across dozens of microservices, containers, and cloud regions, and when something breaks, "check the logs" is no longer good enough.

OpenTelemetry & Modern Observability is a hands-on, engineering-first guide to building real visibility into distributed systems using OpenTelemetry - the open, vendor-neutral standard now powering observability at organizations of every size. Written by a practicing engineer, this book skips the marketing language and goes straight to what actually works in production: instrumenting real applications, correlating traces, metrics, and logs into one investigation, deploying and scaling the OpenTelemetry Collector, and running all of it reliably on Kubernetes.

Across 14 chapters and a full production-grade capstone project, you'll learn how to:

Instrument HTTP services, databases, external APIs, and background jobs with runnable, copy-paste-ready codeBuild and read distributed traces to find the real root cause of latency and failuresDesign metrics that scale - and avoid the cardinality mistakes that blow up observability billsCorrelate logs, traces, and metrics so every investigation starts with evidence, not guessworkDeploy, scale, and secure the OpenTelemetry Collector, including tail sampling and PII redactionBring it all together on Kubernetes with the OpenTelemetry Operator, DaemonSets, and gateway architecturesConnect telemetry to real reliability engineering: SLOs, error budgets, and incident responseBuild a complete, production-grade observability platform from scratch - then break it on purpose and diagnose the failures using nothing but the telemetry it produces

Every chapter includes fully runnable code (Python, YAML, PromQL), realistic production scenarios, and the hard-won lessons that only come from operating these systems under real incident pressure. Whether you're a backend engineer, SRE, DevOps engineer, or platform engineer, this book will teach you not just how to use OpenTelemetry, but how to think like an observability engineer.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HJ9VSLMN
• ISBN13: 9798173118158
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 148 Pages
• Weight: 0.79 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 8.5" x 11.0"