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Introduction

Scout provides comprehensive observability capabilities through a fully Cloud-native and OpenTelemetry-native platform.

Key Features​

  • Unified Data Collection: Collect all telemetry signals (logs, metrics, traces) through a single OpenTelemetry pipeline
  • Real-time Monitoring: Monitor your applications and infrastructure with near real-time visibility
  • Distributed Tracing: Track requests across service boundaries with detailed trace visualization
  • Metrics Analysis: Analyze system and application metrics with powerful querying and visualization
  • Automated Instrumentation: Leverage OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation for popular frameworks and libraries
  • Custom Instrumention: Flexibility to add custom instrumentation for business-specific telemetry

Architecture Benefits​

Scout OTel Native Architecture

  • Native OpenTelemetry support ensures future-proof observability
  • Scalable collection and processing of telemetry data
  • Efficient storage optimized for different signal types
  • Correlation between logs, metrics, and traces
  • Built-in support for service maps and dependency analysis

Getting Started​

Let's setup Scout in less than 5 minutes. We will follow the steps below:

  1. Install the OpenTelemetry Collector: The OpenTelemetry Collector is a vendor-agnostic implementation of the OpenTelemetry specification. It can receive, process, and export telemetry data. You can install it using Docker, Kubernetes, or directly on your machine. The installation method will depend on your environment and preferences.
  2. Configure the OpenTelemetry Collector: Step 1 should help you get started with a collector that can receive, process, and export telemetry data. For advanced configurations, you can refer to detailed OpenTelemetry Collector configuration guide
  3. Configure the Scout Exporter: Next, configure your otel collector to send data to Scout. You can find the configuration details in the Scout Exporter documentation. This will typically involve setting up the endpoint, authentication, and any other required parameters. Scout exporter is available for all signals (logs, metrics, traces) and can be configured to send data to Scout.
  4. Instrument your application: Use OpenTelemetry SDKs to instrument your application code and send telemetry data to the collector. Depending on your setup, please follow Auto-instrumentation) or Manual-instrumentation guides to instrument your application.
  5. Instrument your infrastructure: Use OpenTelemetry to collect telemetry data from your infrastructure components. This can include servers, databases, and other services. For example, for AWS ECS Fargate, please read AWS ECS Instrumentation to collect telemetry data from your Fargate services.
  6. Observe your telemetry data: Access the Scout UI to view and analyze your telemetry data. You can explore logs, metrics, and traces to gain insights into your applications and infrastructure. The UI provides powerful querying and visualization capabilities to help you understand your data better. Scout comes with a variety of dashboards and visualizations to help you get started quickly. You can also create custom dashboards to suit your needs.
  7. Feedback and Support: If you encounter any issues or have questions, reach out to the Scout support team for assistance.