Mastering Application Insights - a Comprehensive Observability Training

Introduction

Have you ever wondered what is going on in your application at runtime? Where is the latency coming from? How much heap is being used under load? Are you hitting your thread limits? How long does it take to query the database? What is the request flow between all your services? What is the latency of all services for a slow request? How can you find the cause of this slowness?

Many more questions can be answered if you made your application observable. If you want to know how to reach that and what you can learn from these new insights, register for this workshop.

Detailed description
The goal of this workshop is to learn how to make your application more observable in terms of metrics, logging and tracing. Especially the combination of these 3 is very powerful. During the workshop we will change Java code to add custom metrics, add custom spans and add logging. And you will learn how to use libraries which have already done a lot of work for you. You will also learn how a setup can look like to bring all the observability data together with OpenTelemetry Collector. Next to that you will learn how to find the metrics, traces and logging in Grafana with Prometheus, Loki and Tempo, so you get the insights of your application in a visual way.

Target audience
This training is suitable for any developer with a Java background who wants to learn more about making an application or application landscape observable. During the training we will hands-on exercises with an Java application. Some experience with Docker can be helpful.

Learning goals

• Understanding of observability
• OpenTelemetry
• Metrics, traces and logging
• The power of combining metrics, traces and logging
• Hands-on with a Java demo application to make it observable
• Usage of Grafana for metrics, traces and logs

Training outline

• Morning: Observability, OpenTelemetry, hands-on with metrics
• Afternoon: hands-on with logging and tracing and the combination of metrics, logging and tracing

Provided training material
Slides and source code of a demo application

About the trainer
Cees is a recognized Grafana Champion and senior software engineer at OpenValue. As a software engineer he has almost 20 years experience in a broad spectrum of application and application landscapes. Cees likes to visualize things, either with dashboards or drawings. When you see a visual representation, things get more tangible and it is easier to understand. Same applies for the behavior of an application or multiple services in a landscape. By creating visual insights Cees solved already quite a number of problems at different companies where others were not able to find the cause of the problems. He is passionate about his work and likes to share the extensive knowledge he has gained over the last decade.

Note: This training can be given in Dutch or English at one of the OpenValue offices (Utrecht, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Arnhem, Munich, Dusseldorf, Vienna, Zurich) or at your own location. Please contact us to discuss possibilities for a remote training and for training in German.