Code Red Newsletter #1

Hi there,

Welcome to the very first installment of the Code RED Newsletter!

This brand-new newsletter covers observability with one eye on OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Perses and cloud-native open-source topics; and the other eye on Dash0, our take on simplifying observability building on open standards.

Every two weeks, the Code RED newsletter brings you a selection of interesting things to read and watch about Observability. Which, by the way, is the best way to know whether your system has melted down yet. (The more medieval way to know whether the system is down, is to hear the lamentations of the end users.)

In focus: Open-source standards

Every installment of the Code RED newsletter will center on a theme. This time we focus on open-source standards for observability and why they matter. Because you surely have already installed more observability agents in your lifetime than you ever wished for. Make the next one count, with the power of open-source!

The birth of OpenTelemetry

In Episode 13 of the Code RED podcast, Mirko and Ben Sigelman, former CEO of Lightstep, talk about how OpenTelemetry was born and why it is irreversibly changing the observability industry.

This was also a theme in Episode 15 of the Code RED podcast, entitled “The Open-source Frontier”, in which Mirko talks with Dynatrace’s Alois Reitbauer.

OpenTelemetry is the second largest project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) by count of contributors and commits. And there are good chances that the OpenTelemetry collector is the last observability agent you will install!

Perses: True open-source dashboards

Perses is a Sandbox project of the CNCF to provide a community driven, true open-source dashboarding tool. The Perses project is showing remarkable velocity. The recently-released version 0.50 adds support for a new visualization, the Status History panel, alongside a long list of other improvements. Check it out!

At Dash0 we have a soft spot for Perses: we love open standards and believe you should be able to use your dashboards with any observability tool of your choosing. We have been building Dash0’s dashboarding system to be compatible with Perses’, so that you can use dashboards built with Dash0 in Perses and vice-versa. Let’s leave vendor lock-in behind.

Linkerd steps up their support for OpenTelemetry

Service meshes are the epitome of distributed systems: they get in between your components, ensuring that communication happening between your components happens securely and smoothly. And guess what: it is also the perfect place to add some more distributed tracing into your system!

And indeed, the awesome people of Linkerd are hard at work on improving their support of OpenTelemetry. Find out all about it by joining on Feb 13, 2025 “OpenTelemetry and Linkerd”, the next installment of the Service Mesh Academy with Flynn, Buoyant’s tech evangelist, and Dash0’s Michele.

See it in action: The power of the open-source ecosystem

When your tool speaks open protocols, the entire ecosystem is easier to integrate with. In the “Autoscaling your Kubernetes application with Dash0” blog, Michele shows how a handful of configurations let Kubernetes scale up and down your applications based on telemetry from Dash0!

No log left behind: Collecting Journald logs with the OTel collector

It’s likely that every Linux installation you have on your (virtual) hosts, collects logs using Journald, the logging system of Systemd. In this guide, Marcel shows you how to collect Journald logs with the OpenTelemetry collector.

More cool newsletters!

If Code RED has whet your appetite about stuff happening in the world of observability and cloud-native, we are sure you will love o11y.news, Observability 360 and Mastering Observability. We always have a smile on our faces when we see emails from these fine publications hit our mailbox!

The Code RED Podcast

Mirko, Dash0’s CEO, is the host of the Code RED podcast (of which this newsletter is an offshoot). Mirko speaks weekly to leaders in the observability space. In all honesty and without tooting our own horn too much, it’s a really enjoyable podcast! You find the Code RED podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcast, and YouTube.

Let the world know you are good at OpenTelemetry

Who does not like certifications? Hey, I am myself shooting for the (Kubernetes) stars by trying to hit gold as a Kubestronaut.

And if you, like me, cannot ever have enough badges on your social profiles, check out the new CNCF OpenTelemetry Certification! Preparing that exam will give you a solid introduction to the world of OpenTelemetry, covering the fundamentals of observability, instrumentation strategies, semantic conventions, and of course the API and SDK.

And that’s it for this very first installment of the Code RED newsletter. Look forward to the next installment on Friday, February 14th.

Kasper, out.