When instrumenting for Observability, there are many different starting points, depending on the infrastructure of your app. Services like AWS or GCP can automatically generate OpenTelemetry data. Infrastructure like service meshes, proxies, and databases have easy-to-configure integrations with OpenTelemetry. And you may also want to instrument your services to generate span and metric data.

So how do you know where to begin? The topics below will help guide you, based on where you are on your OpenTelemetry journey.

Getting Started

If you are new to OpenTelemetry and are starting from scratch, then these guides will provide you with what you need to start instrumenting your code and sending data to Lightstep.

Intro to Observability & OpenTelemetry

The topics below provide you with the fundamentals of Observability and OpenTelemetry:

  1. Observability Primer
  2. What is OpenTelemetry?
  3. Signals

    Quickstart: Sending data to Lighststep Observability

Once you understand the core concepts, you can start instrumenting your code by following these topics:

  1. Quickstart - get the OpenTelemetry Demo App example up and running and sending data to Lightstep Observability in no time!
  2. OpenTelemetry Collector Quickstart - learn the basics of the OpenTelemetry Collector and how to configure it to send data to Lightstep Observability.
  3. Instrumentation Quickstart - learn how to send instrumentation data to Lightstep using OpenTelemetry’s supported languages.