Understanding Observability with Elixir Telemetry

Ethan Gunderson provides an in-depth discussion on the role of telemetry in achieving observability within Elixir applications. He explains that telemetry refers to the dynamic dispatching of events, allowing the communication of event occurrences from one piece of code to another. He outlines the convenience of libraries emitting telemetry events, which application code can then subscribe to, without intricate setup processes. Moreover, he explores the concept of traces in monitoring the execution of requests and spans as subdivisions of traces which allow for better granularity in monitoring. He places emphasis on the powerful combination of telemetry with tools like Spandex and OpenTelemetry in order to enrich data collection with tags. Gunderson also discusses distributed tracing to connect related traces, making systems more comprehensible. He candidly presents challenges such as leaky abstractions and the potential loss of traces, offering solutions and discussions on each. Gunderson underscores the minimal amount of additional coding required to leverage these tools and achieve extensive observability in production systems.