OpenTelemetry has been getting a lot of attention in the observability field. Moreover, in StackState’s latest release , we added support for OpenTelemetry traces . Melcom van Eeden, software developer at StackState, was one of our developer champions who made this possible. In addition to joining us on this episode of StackPod, he wrote a blog post on how to leverage OpenTelemetry with StackState and he recorded a tutorial video about the topic . Melcom is obviously very enthusiastic (and knowledgeable) about this technology. You can imagine we had to have Melcom on the StackPod to talk more about this “knight in shining armor,” as he calls it.
Melcom has been doing software engineering for a long time. He started in school, picking IT subjects and building what he likes to call “weird stuff.” After school, Melcom started working in IT and got introduced to different databases and programming languages. “I think that piqued my interest,” he says. “I wanted to learn more about different languages and technologies.”
He worked in different tech jobs, going from backend to frontend roles and vice versa and got introduced to cloud architecture systems - specifically AWS - a few years ago. Eventually, he joined StackState. “OpenTelemetry is a fairly new service and framework,” he said. “StackState implementing OpenTelemetry and bringing it into their product, that’s the one thing that made me join StackState. It was amazing.”
During the StackPod, Melcom and Anthony dive into all kinds of topics related to OpenTelemetry and what it does for observability, such as:
What does serverless mean and what does it have to do with OpenTelemetry?
What is OpenTelemetry exactly?
Why is OpenTelemetry such an innovative new standard?
How can OpenTelemetry help IT - not just DevOps and SRE teams, but also developers - in their work?
How can you leverage OpenTelemetry with StackState?
"As soon as you add OpenTelemetry to observability, you get five more relations, you get two red blocks, it looks like you created chaos. But it did not, it brought more insight into what you're currently running and what is potentially going wrong in your system," says Melcom. "It might look all green and nice on top, what is happening below? All those missing things are filled in by OpenTelemetry - it's really amazing."
Listen to the full episode and learn more about OpenTelemetry .
Also, here are some useful links to articles and videos about OpenTelemetry if you want to learn even more about it:
How to Use OpenTelemetry to Troubleshoot a Serverless Environment with StackState (tutorial blog post by Melcom)
Troubleshoot a Serverless Environment with OpenTelemetry and StackState (tutorial video by Melcom)
Enjoy the episode!
