Colin Douch, Observability Tech Lead at Cloudflare, and Jayson Cena, SRE at Cloudflare, dive into the complexities of migrating from Syslog-NG to OpenTelemetry. They discuss the motivations for this shift, such as scalability and memory safety, while tackling challenges like maintaining uninterrupted customer traffic. The duo also highlights the importance of redundancy in logging systems and shares insights on logging protocols, illustrating the balance between resource usage and operational speed in a high-performance environment.
Cloudflare's migration to OpenTelemetry significantly enhances its logging capabilities by improving scalability, performance, and maintainability for handling millions of logs per second.
The successful deployment of OpenTelemetry required meticulous planning to ensure uninterrupted customer traffic, showcasing the importance of operational efficiency during major transitions.
Deep dives
Importance of Managing Unmanaged Devices and Apps
Companies face significant challenges in securing data when employees use unmanaged devices and non-approved applications. Traditional identity and access management (IAM) and mobile device management (MDM) solutions often fall short in addressing these security gaps. It is essential to implement strategies that extend beyond conventional methods to safeguard sensitive information effectively. Organizations need to prioritize solutions that cater to the complexities of modern work environments.
Cloudflare's Scalable Logging Infrastructure
Cloudflare has successfully migrated its extensive logging infrastructure from syslogNG to OpenTelemetry, significantly enhancing its logging capabilities. This migration addresses the challenges posed by handling millions of logs per second across numerous global locations, showcasing the company's robust scalability. The transition not only modernizes the logging framework but also improves performance, making the logging system more manageable and efficient. By utilizing OpenTelemetry, Cloudflare can better meet the demands of its large-scale operations.
Deployment Challenges and Solutions
The process of deploying OpenTelemetry without disrupting customer traffic required meticulous planning and execution to minimize downtime. Cloudflare experienced initial challenges with gaps during the switch from syslogNG to OpenTelemetry but overcame these by employing automation techniques with systemd units. This allowed for a seamless transition, maintaining service continuity during the migration phase. The ability to adapt rapidly in such a large-scale environment is crucial for operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.
The Role of Observability in Modern Infrastructure
Observability goes beyond simple monitoring by enabling organizations to gather crucial insights from collected data, particularly when addressing unknown issues. With the upgrade to OpenTelemetry, Cloudflare aims to enhance its observability capabilities, facilitating better analysis and troubleshooting processes. Encouraging contribution from various teams within the organization fosters collaboration and accelerates improvement within their observability stack. Ultimately, companies need to emphasize the importance of having comprehensive data accessibility to better support incident resolution.
Cloudflare’s transition from SysLog-NG to OpenTelemetry is the topic of discussion on this episode of Day Two DevOps. Guests Colin Douch and Jayson Cena from Cloudflare explain the reasons behind the migration, including the need for better scalability, memory safety, and maintainability. They delve into challenges such as ensuring uninterrupted customer traffic and optimizing performance.... Read more »
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