Getting started with OpenTelemetry for Java and New Relic

Large-scale distributed systems, composed of interconnected microservices, often suffer from hidden dependencies, making distributed tracing essential for tracking requests across service boundaries and identifying latency, bottlenecks, and failures. OpenTelemetry, an open-source telemetry framework born from the merger of OpenTracing and OpenCensus, is designed to be robust, portable, and easy to implement across multiple languages, offering APIs, libraries, agents, and collector services to capture distributed traces and metrics. It maintains backward compatibility with OpenTracing and OpenCensus, allowing seamless migration without breaking changes. The article highlights the beta release of OpenTelemetry, which includes SDKs for languages like Erlang, Go, Java, JavaScript, and Python, and details its integration with New Relic for monitoring Java applications through both manual and automatic instrumentation. It explains how OpenTelemetry's architecture, including its API, SDK, and Collector, supports exporting data to various formats and observability tools, and provides examples of instrumenting Java applications to send telemetry data to New Relic.