ServiceNow Cloud Observability

Test and Review the Results

Istio is now configured to send OpenTelemetry data to Cloud Observability via a local OpenTelemetry Collector. Let’s use the Bookinfo application to test our configuration and review the results in Cloud Observability.

  1. Load the Bookinfo app in your browser again and refresh a few times to generate some traces.
  2. Sign in to ServiceNow Cloud Observability
  3. Click on Notebooks in the side navigation bar Notebooks
  4. In the Unified Query Builder change All telemetry to Spans with Change Telemetry Type
  5. In the Search for a span attribute key textbox enter service then in the Search for values textbox enter productpage.default and hit enter. This will execute the query to get latency values from all spans for the service productpage.default in the last hour Query Input
  6. Below the chart, click on the Span samples tab. This shows a list of all spans that match the query. Click on one of the span records in the table. This will load the trace view for the trace that includes that span in a new tab. Span Samples
  7. Review the information that is available in this trace view. You should see a tree of the egress and ingress operations and the amount of latency they contributed as the request flows through the istio-ingressgateway to the productpage and from productpage to the details service. Click on each of the operations and notice the attributes that are populated in the sidebar on the right. You should see rich data about the context of the operation including versions, namespace, protocols, networking details, user agent and more. Trace View

You now have Istio configured for tracing with OpenTelemetry and a collector deployed to export the data to Cloud Observability. Using this data you can monitor the health of requests flowing through your services and build dependency diagrams to visualize your microservice architecture. The rich span data provides important information about the context of requests and enables powerful querying capabilities to aid your investigations.

All of this was accomplished without needing to modify any of the actual services running in your cluster. This solution allows you to start observing your applications with minimal effort and without the need to involve the service teams.

Before wrapping up, let’s take a look at a couple additional configuration options that you can use to fine-tune your tracing data.

next: Additional Options