Chapter 2. Why Use OpenTelemetry?
A map is not the actual territory.
Alfred Korzybski1
If you’re reading this, you’re almost certainly in the business of software. Your job may be to solve business or human problems by writing code, or to ensure that great fleets of software and servers are highly available and responsive to requests. Or maybe that was your job at one point and now you tackle technical problems of a different sort—how to organize, coordinate, and motivate human beings to efficiently ship and maintain software.
Software itself is a vital part of our global economy; the only things more crucial are the people tasked with its creation and upkeep. And the scale of their task is enormous—modern developers and operations teams are being asked to do more with less, even as system complexity grows without bounds. You get some documentation, a group of like-minded individuals, and 40 hours a week to keep systems running that generate measurable fractions of the global gross domestic product.
It doesn’t take too long to realize that this is, perhaps, not quite enough.
The map of your software system that you build in your mind will inevitably drift away from that on paper. Your understanding of what’s happening at any given time is always limited by how expansive the system is, how many changes are occurring in it, and how many people are changing it. New innovations, such as generative AI, bring this observation into sharp focus—these components are true black boxes, ...
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