Setting Up a Learning Environment with Demo Applications

This chapter guides you through setting up a learning environment for the practical examples throughout this book and for independent experimentation. As Grafana Labs offers a free tier of their cloud service, we will use this for the storage and searching of data. To produce rich, useful data, we will use the OpenTelemetry demo application. This demo application deploys the services needed to run the OpenTelemetry Astronomy Shop locally. These applications are written in many different languages and are instrumented to produce metrics, logs, and distributed traces. This application will help you interact directly (and via load generators) with real applications and see observability telemetry in real time in the Grafana Labs instance.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

• Introducing Grafana Cloud
• Installing the prerequisite tools
• Installing the OpenTelemetry Demo application...