Application Instrumentation with OpenTelemetry and Azure

As applications grow into distributed microservices, understanding how requests flow through your system becomes critical to solving performance bottlenecks. This text-based guide teaches you how to implement robust telemetry to gain clear visibility into your cloud-native applications. You will transition from guessing why your application is slow to pinpointing exact latency issues using structured observability data. By understanding the core standards of OpenTelemetry, you will be able to instrument your services, capture distributed traces, and export this critical data to Azure Monitor and Application Insights for real-time analysis. What you'll learn: Understand foundational observability concepts, including the differences between traces, metrics, and logs; Configure the OpenTelemetry API and SDK within your application architecture; Instrument distributed services to track requests across multiple network boundaries; Apply modern semantic conventions to ensure consistent metadata and structured logging; Export telemetry data seamlessly to Azure Monitor and Application Insights; Diagnose system latency and performance bottlenecks using distributed tracing data. The course begins with essential terminology and the architecture of OpenTelemetry before walking you through step-by-step instrumentation of a multi-service application. You will read clear explanations, study practical code snippets, and learn how to analyze the resulting trace data on Azure. This course is designed for software developers, system architects, and DevOps beginners who want to build reliable, observable systems without any prior experience in distributed tracing. Start reading today to bring deep, production-ready observability to your cloud applications.