Today, we are very excited to announce the acquisition of Aspecto, an OpenTelemetry (OTel) pioneer whose capabilities will further extend SmartBear’s modern, developer-focused observability capabilities. Aspecto’s solution discovers modern microservice based architectures and visualizes all the real-time interactions between services and APIs through advanced distributed tracing capabilities.

Recently, conversations have been increasing around OpenTelemetry; it is gaining more and more momentum in Node.js development circles, but what is it? How can we take advantage of the key concepts and implement them in our projects? Of note, NodeSource is a supporter of OpenTelemetry, and we have recently implemented full support of the open-source standard in our product N|Solid. It allows us to make our powerful Node.js insights accessible via the protocol.

As a cloud service provider, observability is a critical subject as it's strongly related to the availability of the services running on the platform. We need to understand everything that is happening on our platform to troubleshoot errors as fast as possible and improve performance issues. A year ago, while the platform was still in private beta, we faced a tough reliability issue: users were facing random 500 errors when accessing their applications.