From Telemetry to Traffic

Observability technologies such as telemetry agents, automatic APM, manual OpenTelemetry instrumentation, Kubernetes sidecars, eBPF, and proxies collect different forms of evidence rather than serving as direct replacements for one another. Metrics provide aggregate system health, logs report selected events, APM traces connect common framework operations, manual instrumentation supplies business context, eBPF reveals host and network behavior, and traffic capture can preserve complete protocol exchanges. Agents primarily collect, enrich, buffer, and route existing telemetry, while APM and manual instrumentation create increasingly detailed runtime and domain-level context, though both introduce compatibility, maintenance, privacy, and cost considerations. Sidecars are deployment patterns rather than telemetry types, offering workload-local collection at the expense of per-pod resources and operational complexity, whereas eBPF can cover broad fleets without code changes but depends on host permissions, kernel support, and limited application semantics. Proxies and MITM traffic capture provide valuable request and response visibility for API debugging, replay, testing, and analytics, but can affect latency, require TLS certificate management, and expose highly sensitive data. The recommended approach is a layered strategy that begins with compact, low-cost signals, adds traces and business instrumentation where needed, uses eBPF for system or legacy gaps, and enables payload capture selectively under strong controls for sampling, redaction, encryption, retention, access auditing, and collector health.

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