API observability with OpenTelemetry:Reducing MTTR by 90%

Elli (Gethelios) 's photo
Elli (Gethelios)
·

2 min read

Visit the full article- API observability: Leveraging OTel to improve developer experience (written by Liron Kreiss)

In a nutshell: Here's how applying API observability by instrumenting data strongly helps developers to debug issues much faster, boost productivity, and lower the MTTR of distributed applications.

Today’s modern development relies heavily on APIs – in the communication between microservices, mobile app dev, or in other areas. Like with other components in distributed apps, it’s often hard to have control and visibility over all APIs across all microservices for the sake of debugging and fast troubleshooting.

API observability and troubleshooting tools based on actual (instrumented) data are offering visibility into API inventory, specs & runs and therefore help identify and debug issues instantly. This article features a developer experience using API observability features in the Helios platform.

Specifically, demonstrates how it saves time and increase developer productivity in the following ways:

  1. Leveraging an auto-generated API catalog, hence enabling the discovery of the entire API inventory used by an application

  2. Using API overview and spec tools to gain access to API documentation and performance as calculated automatically based on instrumented API calls

  3. API troubleshooting by gaining immediate access to different kinds of API errors and failures with the full E2E context powered by OTel based distributed tracing and context propagation

Lets overview some examples (click for the full article)

APIsobservabilityOpenTelemetrydistributed systemdistributed tracing