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Gain Better Observability
with OpenTelemetry and
InfluxDB
Zoe Steinkamp | Developer Advocate,
InfluxData
May 2023

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Zoe Steinkamp
Developer Advocate
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LinkedIn

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Agenda
● Introduction to OpenTelemetry + logs, traces, and metrics
● Overview of InfluxDB Cloud powered by IOx (InfluxDB Cloud)
● Introduction to InfluxDB Observability Project
○ Jaeger
○ Grafana
○ Hot R.O.D.
○ Telegraf
● Learning Resources

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Introduction to OpenTelemetry
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Logs, Traces, and Metrics
From: “Metrics,
tracing, and logging”
by Peter Bourgon

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OpenTelemetry key concepts

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What can OpenTelemetry do for
me?
● A single vendor-neutral collector binary and a vendor-agnostic
instrumentation library that can be deployed in a variety of ways with
support for both automatic and manual instrumentation.
● An end-to-end implementation to generate, emit, collect, process and
export telemetry data.
● Full control of your data with the ability to send data to multiple
destinations in parallel through configuration.
● Open-standard semantic conventions to ensure vendor-agnostic data
collection
● A path forward no matter where you are on your observability journey.

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Overview of
InfluxDB Cloud
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InfluxDB’s new storage engine is built on
● Rust
● Apache Arrow
● Apache Parquet
● Arrow Flight
● DataFusion

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Typical Architecture & Deployment

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Unlimited cardinality
InfluxDB 3.0's database engine is designed to handle high
cardinality datasets without compromising performance. Track
your devices or software instances on many dimensions. This is
what will allow us to store logs and traces, instead of only
metrics.

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Native SQL support
InfluxDB 3.0 features native SQL support. Most developers (and
all data scientists) are already familiar with SQL, so teams can
gather insights faster and with less friction. We are also working
on expanding what you can do with SQL to allow
downsampling, aggregation, and other key features.However,
InfluxDB IOx also supports InfluxQL and Flux. Once again,
we’re taking backwards compatibility seriously.

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High-performance data
ingestion
InfluxDB 3.0 is designed to handle high write and query loads,
making it suitable for processing massive amounts of
monitoring data in real-time. Its high-performance capabilities
help developers capture and analyze data to identify patterns,
trends, and anomalies, which leads to faster and more informed
decision-making.

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Seamless integration with
observability tools
InfluxDB 3.0 integrates with popular observability tools such as
Grafana, Jaeger, and OpenTelemetry to create a powerful
ecosystem for monitoring, tracing, and visualizing your
infrastructure. It also integrates with pandas and other data
science tools to take action on your data.

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Introduction to InfluxDB
Observability Project
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Hot R.O.D otelcol-influxdb
otel
spans
logs
latency
Jaeger-query
OpenTelemetry with InfluxDB
Jaeger-UI
https://github.com/influxdata/influxdb-
observability
This demo provides a practical example of integrating InfluxDB, a
high-performance time series database, with OpenTelemetry, an open-source
observability framework, to achieve real-time monitoring and tracing of a
distributed application.
● Aims to provide a standard for converting OTEL -> InfluxDB Schema and
InfluxDB Schema -> OTEL
● Parts of otelcol-influxdb can be replaced with Telegraf

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Hot R.O.D - Rides on Demand

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Jaeger

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Grafana

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InfluxDB Cloud

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Run InfluxDB Observability
1. Sign up for an InfluxDB Cloud account.
2. Create 2 buckets, “otel” and “otel-archival” where
“otel-archival” has a longer retention policy.
3. Create “.env” file with the authentication credentials.
4. Install flight-sql as per the README.md.
5. Build and run the docker images as per the README.md.
6. Import your dashboard with the JSON at
demo/grafana/dashboards/ into Grafana.
7. Create traces by clicking on a customer on the HotRod
application.

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Grafana Setup Details

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Grafana Setup Details

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Live Demo
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Learning Resources
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Try it yourself
https://www.influxdata.com https://github.com/InfluxCommunity

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Further Resources
Get started: influxdata.com/cloud
Forums: community.influxdata.com
Slack: influxcommunity.slack.com
GH: github.com/InfluxCommunity
E-book: awesome.influxdata.com
Docs: docs.influxdata.com
Blogs: influxdata.com/blog
InfluxDB University: influxdata.com/university

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T H A N K Y O U