WEBINAR: Coming soon to a browser near you: OpenTelemetry! Experts share how the OTel community is building better browser observability.

Register here

Use the OTel Tracing API and see your traces in Embrace with our new implementation for Android

Hanson Ho
OpenTelemetry
24 July 2024 • 1 min read

In the rapidly evolving application development landscape, the need for robust and flexible observability tools has never been greater. Developers often face challenges with inconsistent instrumentation, as different libraries and frameworks may use varying methods, leading to fragmented and inconsistent telemetry data.

Additionally, non-standard vendor APIs can be restrictive, making it difficult for developers to create and integrate their own telemetry solutions.

We’ve seen this particular issue crop up firsthand with our customers since rolling out our OpenTelemetry-powered SDKs. Customers need compatibility between instrumentation built on the standardized OTel APIs and the Embrace SDK. Achieving this compatibility in a truly seamless way has not been without its challenges.

That’s why we’re now excited to announce a significant enhancement in our capabilities that improves SDK extensibility for our customers. The latest version of our Android OpenTelemetry (OTel) SDK now supports the standard OTel Tracing API. In practice, this means that spans instrumented by the OTel Tracing API will be seamlessly consumed by the Embrace SDK, just as if they were created using our proprietary Performance Tracing APIs.

This change is made possible via an implementation of the OTel Tracing API that integrates within the Embrace ecosystem.

With this new development, we’re opening up opportunities for members of the OTel community and Embrace customers to instrument libraries using the standard OTel APIs.

Standard OTel instrumentation libraries can now be plugged into the Embrace SDK as if they were using our APIs by swapping in Embrace’s OTel Tracing API implementation for the one they are currently using.

This solution empowers devs to leverage widely adopted OTel APIs and instrument code with ease and consistency that works with any implementation of the OTel API. It also allows for greater flexibility in how telemetry data is recorded and managed, making it easier to adapt to various application environments and requirements. Compatibility with the Embrace platform means that any instrumentation that uses the standard OTel Tracing API can now be incorporated into the data processed and analyzed by Embrace.

We encourage all our customers and other members of the OTel community to take full advantage of this new capability. If you want to analyze specific libraries or reuse existing library instrumentations to enhance your monitoring, you can start doing so using this feature, achieving better application observability and performance insights in the process.

For detailed documentation and examples of how to get started, please visit our documentation site.

Embrace Deliver incredible mobile experiences with Embrace.

Get started today with 1 million free user sessions.

Get started free
Author
Hanson Ho
Hanson Ho
Hanson Ho is an Android engineer at Embrace. In his role, Hanson focuses on resolving performance and stability issues on the Android SDK with speed and efficiency. Hanson brings nearly 20 years of experience in software development to the org. Prior to joining Embrace, Hanson worked in different technical roles at SAP, Salesforce, and Twitter, where he spent over seven years focused on Android performance and observability at a massive scale. During his time at Embrace, Hanson has played an integral role in developing the Embrace Android SDK and has played a key role in lending his technical expertise to members of the team.
Related Content