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· 11 min read
Nočnica Mellifera

This guide is for anyone who is getting started monitoring their application with OpenTelemetry, and is generating unstructured logs. As is well understood at this point, structured logs are ideal for post-hoc incident analysis and broad-range querying of your data. However, it’s not always feasible to implement highly structured logging at the code level.

With SigNoz, you get some parsing automatically to identify details like timestamp, container ID, container name, and an optional body. But it’s possible to go much deeper with a relatively simple configuration. It’s also a good idea to check for attributes that may contain Personal Identifying Information (PII) and remove them with filters. Since the SigNoz collector is a fork of the OpenTelemetry collector, this tutorial will also work for configuring a baseline OpenTelemetry collector.

· 3 min read
Nočnica Mellifera

In a recent conversation on our SigNoz community Slack, a user shared their query that asks a deceptively simple question: what is the average time between two spans in a trace?

The usefulness of this answer is evident if you think about how often the total trace time does not highlight the time you care about most. This could mean any number of things: that the total trace time of handling a web request might include lots of spans after a satisfying response was sent to the user. Or the time to handle a critical transaction might happen inside a larger trace.