gRPC (Google Remote Procedure Call) is a high-performance, open-source universal RPC  framework that Google developed to achieve high-speed communication between microservices. gRPC has Protobuf (protocol buffers) by default which would format or serialize the messages to a specific format that will be highly packed, highly efficient data. By its virtue of being a lightweight RPC, gRPC is suited for many use-cases.

OpenTelemetry and Jaeger are both open-source projects under Cloud Native Computing Foundation. In this article, let us understand the key concepts involved in both projects, their features, and their differences.

People ignore design that ignores people.

Our dashboards enable engineering teams to take quick decisions. So, a good design is critical.

We have been busy fine-tuning our dashboards to make them more user-friendly. Welcome to SigNal 11 - our monthly product updates where we update you on what we’ve been up to.

Modern digital organizations have rapidly adopted microservices-based architecture for their applications. Microservices-based apps have components designed around business capabilities serving a specific purpose. It enables smaller engineering teams to own specific services that lead to increased productivity.

There are standalone distributed tracing tools like Jaeger, and there are APM tools that do not provide distributed tracing capabilities. In this article, we will see how distributed tracing complements an APM tool for a holistic performance monitoring experience.

GraphQL is a query language for APIs developed by Facebook in 2012. It was then open-sourced in 2015. GraphQL enables frontend developers or consumers of APIs to request the exact data that they need, with no over-fetching or under-fetching. In this article, we will learn how to monitor GraphQL APIs with OpenTelemetry and SigNoz.

Microservices architecture allows technology companies to build application services around business capabilities. It enables rapid development and also boosts developer productivity. But it also introduces complexity. Troubleshooting and operating an internet-scale application based on microservices is hard. And that’s where distributed tracing comes into the picture.

Monitoring and troubleshooting distributed systems like those built with microservices is challenging. Traditional monitoring tools struggle with distributed systems as they were made for a single component. Distributed tracing solves this problem by tracking a transaction across components.

In this article, we will implement distributed tracing for a nodejs application based on microservices architecture. To implement distributed tracing, we will be using open-source solutions - SigNoz and OpenTelemetry, so you can easily follow the tutorial.

Both DataDog and Prometheus are application monitoring tools aimed to improve application performance. While DataDog is a proprietary SaaS vendor in the APM domain, Prometheus is an open-source metrics monitoring tool that was the second project to graduate from Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2018. Let us compare DataDog and Prometheus in this article.