OpenTelemetry and Go: Revolutionizing Automatic Instrumentation with eBPF

2023/08/15

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The article discusses the major news from the OpenTelemetry Go project, highlighting the inclusion of eBPF techniques that have enabled automatic instrumentation for Go services. Previously, Go had limitations when it came to automatically instrumenting applications, requiring manual editing of the code. This posed challenges for large microservice architectures where operations teams couldn't access or edit application code. However, with the integration of eBPF, Go developers can now achieve a truly automatic process similar to the Java OpenTelemetry sdk. eBPF, a powerful technology for dynamic modification of kernel code, allows for monitoring and analyzing network traffic, system calls, and other kernel events. It enables the development of flexible instrumentation for monitoring and troubleshooting complex systems. The article emphasizes that the stable version of instrumentation has been achieved, making it usable in production. This breakthrough in automatic instrumentation with eBPF revolutionizes the way Go developers can add observability to their applications.