Deep understanding of the actual behavior of a system is key for me. I like to know all the details because it helps me to see the whole picture. I am visually oriented, so tools like Grafana really help me in these situations. Observability is a topic that has come up in the last few years, but I have actually been doing this for years. But the good thing is that it is more standardized now.

One of the great things about OpenTelemetry is the standardisation of span attributes and resource attributes. An example of this is deployment.environment. Attribute Type Description Examples Requirement Level deployment.environment string Name of the deployment environment (aka deployment tier). staging; production Recommended Source: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/semconv/resource/deployment-environment/ With Grafana Faro you can configure the environment, as I explained in my blog post about the setup of Grafana Faro. This adds environment to the setup. In my technical deep dive blog post I explained that the data is sent as logs and as traces.

If you use Hugo to create a blog or website, as I do, and you use GitHub Pages to host the blog, it’s hard to get observability signals in your usual observability stack. I have been using Grafana, Loki, Tempo and Prometheus for a long time, so using this stack makes sense to me. You can use Google Analytics with Hugo, but I don’t like third party cookies. If you search for Google Analytics' and GDPR’ you will find quite a few articles about the concerns that exist on this topic.