Recently, conversations have been increasing around OpenTelemetry; it is gaining more and more momentum in Node.js development circles, but what is it? How can we take advantage of the key concepts and implement them in our projects? Of note, NodeSource is a supporter of OpenTelemetry, and we have recently implemented full support of the open-source standard in our product N|Solid. It allows us to make our powerful Node.js insights accessible via the protocol.

As a cloud service provider, observability is a critical subject as it's strongly related to the availability of the services running on the platform. We need to understand everything that is happening on our platform to troubleshoot errors as fast as possible and improve performance issues. A year ago, while the platform was still in private beta, we faced a tough reliability issue: users were facing random 500 errors when accessing their applications.

OpenTelemetry is a free and open-source software initiative with the objective of supplying software developers with the means to create distributed systems. OpenTelemetry was developed by engineers at Google, and developers have the ability to utilize it to create a standard foundation for the construction of distributed systems. The goal is to enable developers to write code once and then deploy it in any location of their choosing.

Complex modern systems are the new reality for infrastructure teams, and this is due to the evolution of Cloud Computing and working with Distributed systems, containerization, and microservices by default. The teams now have different infrastructures and virtual services with which they must take care of scalable, reliable, and performative applications.