OpenTelemetry

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Observability Consulting

OpenTelemetry Consulting & Implementation

Modern systems are distributed whether or not you set out to build them that way. A single user request crosses load balancers, services, queues, caches and databases, often written in different languages and owned by different teams. When something is slow or broken, the answer is rarely in one log file.

OpenTelemetry is the CNCF standard that solves this. It gives you one vendor-neutral way to generate traces, metrics and logs across every language and runtime you use, plus one wire protocol, OTLP, to ship them wherever you want. Instrument once, and you are free to change monitoring backends without touching application code again.

Redloop helps engineering teams get there, on whatever they run today: Kubernetes, containers, virtual machines, serverless functions, or a monolith that is not going anywhere. We assess what you have, design a telemetry pipeline that fits your architecture and budget, instrument your services, and hand the whole thing over to your team with the documentation and know-how to run it.

Why teams move to OpenTelemetry

No vendor lock-in

Your instrumentation lives in your code, not in a proprietary agent. Switching or consolidating observability vendors becomes a pipeline change instead of a re-instrumentation project.

One standard for all three signals

Traces, metrics and logs share the same context and resource attributes, so you can pivot from a slow trace to the exact log lines and host metrics behind it.

Control over telemetry spend

Sampling, filtering and aggregation happen in the Collector, under your control, before the data leaves your account and starts costing money per gigabyte.

A skill that transfers

OpenTelemetry is an industry standard backed by every major observability vendor. What your team learns stays useful across projects, tools and employers.

What We Do

OpenTelemetry, End To End

Observability assessment

Observability Assessment & Strategy

We map your current tooling, agents, dashboards and alerts against what your team actually needs to answer in an incident, then produce a target architecture and a migration plan you can execute in stages.

Instrumentation

Instrumentation

Zero-code auto-instrumentation where it is enough, hand-written spans where it is not. We add the business attributes (tenant, order, plan, region) that turn a generic trace into something you can actually query.

Collector pipelines

Collector & Pipeline Design

Agent and gateway Collector topologies, whether DaemonSet, sidecar, standalone host or function layer, with receivers, processors and exporters set up for batching, retries, redaction and multi-backend fan-out.

Migration

Migration From Proprietary Agents

Moving off a commercial APM agent without going blind in the middle. We run both stacks side by side, reconcile the numbers, port dashboards and alerts, and only then retire the old agent.

Cost control

Telemetry Cost Control

Head and tail sampling, attribute pruning, log-to-metric conversion and cardinality limits, tuned so you keep the traces that matter for debugging and stop paying to store the ones nobody reads.

SLOs and enablement

SLOs, Alerting & Enablement

Service level objectives tied to real user journeys, alerts that page on symptoms rather than noise, and hands-on sessions so your engineers can extend the setup themselves after we leave.

Not sure where your observability gaps are?

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How We Work

A Staged Rollout

1. Discover

We review your architecture, current monitoring stack and recent incidents, and agree on the questions your telemetry has to be able to answer.

2. Design

A written target design: signal coverage, semantic conventions and naming, Collector topology, sampling strategy, backend choice and expected running cost.

3. Pilot

We instrument one meaningful service end to end and prove the pipeline in a non-production environment, so the pattern is settled before it is repeated.

4. Roll out

Service by service, with the Collector and CI/CD changes automated so new services are instrumented by default rather than as an afterthought.

5. Hand over

Runbooks, dashboards, alert definitions and working sessions with your engineers. The goal is that you do not need us for the next service.

FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions

OpenTelemetry is an open source observability framework hosted by the CNCF. It provides the APIs, SDKs and tooling to generate traces, metrics and logs from your applications, plus the OTLP protocol to send them to a backend of your choice. It handles producing and shipping telemetry; storing and visualising it is the backend's job.

No. Every major observability vendor accepts OTLP, so in most cases you keep the backend you already pay for and simply change how data reaches it. Adopting OpenTelemetry is what gives you the option to switch later. It does not force the decision now.

OpenTelemetry has stable or near-stable support for Java, .NET, Go, Python, Node.js, Ruby, PHP, Rust, C++ and the browser, and it runs anywhere your code runs: Kubernetes, ECS, plain virtual machines, on-premise hardware or serverless functions. Mixed estates are the normal case rather than the exception, and context propagates across the boundaries between them.

Less than most teams expect. Auto-instrumentation covers common web frameworks, HTTP clients, database drivers, message brokers and cloud SDKs with configuration alone. Code changes come in when you want domain-specific spans and attributes, which is usually the part that pays for itself fastest.

Handled carelessly it can, because it is easy to emit far more data than before. Done properly it usually reduces spend: the Collector lets you sample, drop and aggregate telemetry inside your own account, so you send your backend the data you actually query instead of everything your services can produce.

An assessment and target design is typically two to three weeks. A pilot service instrumented end to end usually follows within a month. Full rollout depends on how many services you run and how much of it your own team takes on, which we actively encourage.