OpenTelemetry Collector Development

Developing a custom component

Building a component for the Open Telemetry Collector requires three key parts:

1. The Configuration - What values are exposed to the user to configure
2. The Factory - Make the component using the provided values
3. The Business Logic - What the component needs to do

For this, we will use the example of building a component that works with Jenkins so that we can track important DevOps metrics of our project(s).

The metrics we are looking to measure are:

1. Lead time for changes - “How long it takes for a commit to get into production”
2. Change failure rate - “The percentage of deployments causing a failure in production”
3. Deployment frequency - “How often a [team] successfully releases to production”
4. Mean time to recover - “How long does it take for a [team] to recover from a failure in production”

These indicators were identified Google’s DevOps Research and Assesment (DORA)[^1] team to help show performance of a software development team. The reason for choosing Jenkins CI is that we remain in the same Open Source Software ecosystem which we can serve as the example for the vendor managed CI tools to adopt in future.

Instrument Vs Component

There is something to consider when improving level of Observability within your organisation since there are some trade offs that get made.