OpenTelemetry
Also known as: OTel
OpenTelemetry is the CNCF standard for collecting traces, metrics, and structured logs from production systems. It is vendor-neutral on the wire (OTLP), so the same instrumentation feeds Grafana, Datadog, Honeycomb, or CloudWatch without code change. TantraDev installs OpenTelemetry from sprint one — observability is part of the data model, not a bolt-on.
Concepts that travel with this one.
Architecture rarely lives in isolation — these are the terms that come up in the same conversation.
Grafana
Grafana is the de-facto dashboarding layer for production telemetry — Prometheus metrics, Loki logs, Tempo traces, and a long list of other sources rendered into one queryable surface. TantraDev ships Grafana dashboards as a deliverable on every cloud engagement, with the RED and USE dashboards built before the first cutover and the alert rules wired into the client's existing PagerDuty.
Observability
Observability is the property of a system that lets you answer questions about its behaviour from its outputs alone, without shipping new code. The three signals are metrics, logs, and traces; the operational test is whether an on-call engineer can root-cause a novel incident from the existing dashboards. Observability is in the data model from week one on every TantraDev engagement, not bolted on after launch.
RED Method
RED stands for Rate, Errors, Duration — the three service-level signals every request-driven service should emit. Rate is requests per second; Errors is the fraction that fail; Duration is the latency distribution. A RED dashboard answers 'is this service healthy right now' in under five seconds. TantraDev ships a RED dashboard per service before the first cutover on every cloud engagement.
Building a system where OpenTelemetry is the load-bearing decision?
30 minutes on the phone, one page in your inbox — what to build, what to skip, what it will cost. You keep the audit even if we are not the right fit.