What am I going to learn in this course?

Do you—and your software teams—care about the performance of your systems? Do you want to know what's really going on inside of them? If so, you need to be able to ask questions about your system state. To ask (and answer) these questions, you need telemetry data.To get your software to emit high-quality telemetry data, you have to instrument it well. At Honeycomb, we like to do this with OpenTelemetry, an open-source project that helps you instrument and collect data. But... Why should you use it? How do you use it?

This course will teach you the foundational concepts and implementation mechanisms of OpenTelemetry instrumentation. We cover the fundamentals of instrumentation, the OpenTelemetry standard and its approach for producing telemetry from software applications, and powering observability using custom instrumentation to debug systems in alignment with your business logic.

How will I learn these things?

This course will teach you instrumentation in two ways: watching videos and completing hands-on activities. 

• Videos will explain concepts and explain/demonstrate examples of mechanisms.
• Labs and quizzes that give you the opportunity to test your knowledge.

What do I need before taking this course to be successful?

• A general understanding of what observability is.
• An intermediate understanding of—and, perhaps, some experience with—how modern software systems work.