Using the OpenTelemetry Demo

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Using the OpenTelemetry Demo

What is the OpenTelemetry (OTel) Demo?

The OTel Demo is a microservices-based application created by OpenTelemetry's community to demonstrate its capabilities in a realistic, distributed system environment. This demo application, known as the OpenTelemetry Astronomy Shop, simulates an e-commerce website composed of over 10 interconnected microservices (written in multiple languages), and communicates via HTTP and gRPC. Each service is fully instrumented with OTel, generating comprehensive traces, metrics, and logs.

The demo serves as an invaluable resource for understanding how to implement and use OpenTelemetry in real-world applications. Using the Ascent platform with the OTel Demo enables you to converge all of the IT data, manage the telemetry data, and monitor and troubleshoot the operational data in real-time. The following steps guide you through the process of using the OTel Demo application with Ascent.

Quick Start Process for Using the OTel Demo app with Ascent

For all users that want to get started with Ascent should follow these five (5) simple steps:

In this guide, we cover the key goals and related activities of each step to ensure a quick and easy setup of Ascent.

How to Deploy the OTEL Demo App

The goal is to ingest telemetry data (logs, metrics, traces) from relevant systems.

Key actions include:

Accessing and deploying the public OpenTelemetry (OTEL) Demo App
Configure data collection setup, frequency and granularity
Ensure data normalization

This guide aims to walk you through the steps required to deploy the OpenTelemetry Demo app and begin sending data to Ascent.

NOTE: We will deploy the OTEL demo app using Docker for this guide.

Prerequisites:

Docker
6 GB of RAM for the application

Step 1: Get and Clone the OTEL demo app repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-demo.git

Step 2: Go to the demo folder:

$ cd opentelemetry-demo/

Step 3: Start the demo app in Docker:

$ docker compose up --force-recreate --remove-orphans --detach

Step 4: (Optional) Enable API observability-driven testing:

$ docker compose up --force-recreate --remove-orphans --detach

Step 5: Test and access the OTEL demo application:

Once the images are built and containers are started, you can now access the following Opentelemetry components on the demo app web store:

Optional: Changing the demo’s primary port number

By default, the demo application will start a proxy for all browser traffic bound to port 8080. To change the port number, set the ENVOY_PORT environment variable before starting the demo.

For example to use port 8081:

$ ENVOY_PORT=8081 docker compose up --force-recreate --remove-orphans --detach

Step 6: Update the OTEL config file:

/src/otel-collector/otelcol-config-extras.yml

Paste the following into the config file, overwriting it completely:

Copy

exporters:
  otlphttp/apicametrics:
    compression: gzip
    disable_keep_alives: true
    encoding: proto
    metrics_endpoint: "https://<YOUR-ASCENT-ENV>/v1/metrics"
    headers:
      Authorization: "Bearer <YOUR-INGEST-TOKEN>"
    tls:
      insecure: false
      insecure_skip_verify: true
  otlphttp/logs:
    logs_endpoint:  https://<YOUR-ASCENT-ENV>/v1/json_batch/otlplogs?namespace=OtelDemo&application=DemoLogs
    encoding: json
    compression: gzip
    headers:
      Authorization: "Bearer <YOUR-INGEST-TOKEN>"
    tls:
      insecure: false
      insecure_skip_verify: true
service:
  pipelines:
    metrics:
      exporters: [otlphttp/apicametrics]
    logs:
      exporters: [otlphttp/logs]

Replace <YOUR-ASCENT-ENV>with your Ascent domain, e.g. company.apica.io
Replace <YOUR-INGEST-TOKEN>with your Ascent Ingest Token, e.g. eyXXXXXXXXXXX...
1. See 'Step 7' to get your 'ingest-token'

Step 7: Get Your Ingest Token from Ascent:

Step 8: Get Data Flowing into Ascent Platform:

Restart the OpenTelemetry collector by running the following command:

$ docker compose restart

Step 9: Verify data flow in Ascent:

Log into Ascent
Navigate to Explore -> Logs & Insights:

You should see namespace "OtelDemo" and Application "DemoLogs":
This confirms that data is flowing from the Opentelemetry Demo Application. Feel free to click into application "DemoLogs" to view all the logs that are being sent from the Demo App.

Now that data is flowing, please follow the steps below to learn how to interact, enhance, and visualize this data in Ascent.

Step 9 - FLOW (Cost Savings Use Case)

Step 10 - Setup and Configure Pipeline

The goal is to transport and process the collected data.

Key actions include:

Select or configure a data pipeline
Define data routing rules
Apply transformations, filtering, or enrichment if needed

Links to related docs include:

Step 11 - Design Queries

The goal is to enable insights by querying telemetry data.

Key actions include:

Understand the query language used
Create baseline queries for system health
Optimize queries for performance and cost
Validate query results

Links to related docs include:

Step 12 - Create Dashboards

The goal is to visualize system performance and behavior in real time.

Key actions include:

Use visual components
Organize dashboards by domain
Incorporate filters
Enable drill-down for troubleshooting.

Links to related docs include:

Step 13 - Setup Alerts and Workflow

The goal is to detect anomalies and automate response actions.

Key actions include:

Define alerting rules
Set up alert destinations
Establish escalation policies and on-call schedules
Integrate with incident management workflows and postmortem tools

FLOW - Cost Savings Use Case

FLOW allows you to filter unecessary data out of your logs before hitting the data lake which leads to significant cost savings. This guide will walk you through how to drop labels from our Otel Demo App logs. You can apply the same functionality to any other data source.

Navigate to the Logs & Insights page:

This view lists all of the datasources pushing data to Ascent. To access the logs, click into "DemoLogs".

To view one of the logs simply click one of them.

We have one of our otel logs here. In this example, we will be dropping "destination.address" and "event.name" from the logs.

To drop these fields, navigate to the Pipeline tab and then click the + button shown below:

Create a new Pipeline:

Enable Drop Labels by click the slider:

On the right of the screen you'll want to preview the logs to know what labels to drop. Select the following and then hit Preview in the top right:

Here are the two labels we want to drop:

Select the key in the dropdown by typing them out or clicking.

Click "Save" in the bottom right:

Go back to the log view to verify the filter rule has been applied. Refresh the page and make sure it is a new log that you're verifying:

As you can see, destination.address and event.name are no longer being ingested:

Dropping a few labels might not seem like a big deal at first, but if you exrapolate that over 10,000 or 100,000's logs, the cost savings start to add up QUICK.

14. To view savings and your configured pipelines navigate to "Pipelines":