OTLP metrics, histograms, trace control behaviors and more: What’s new in July 2024

Welcome to our July 2024 feature roundup at Chronosphere! This month, we’re excited to bring you several new updates designed to enhance your experience and streamline your operations. Whether you’re securing programmatic access, auto-merging OTLP metric attributes, leveraging our new Histogram Metric Type, or managing trace sampling with ease, these features were created to provide you with powerful tools for improved observability. Let’s dive into the details and explore how these enhancements can elevate your monitoring capabilities.

Chronosphere has enhanced its authentication process with the introduction of Secure Programmatic Access for customers. Now, customers can use Okta access tokens for authentication via the chronoctl auth login command. These tokens expire after 24 hours, rotate regularly, and maintain an audit trail, significantly improving security and compliance.

This update is essential for customers who need a secure and auditable method for accessing Chronosphere’s API programmatically. By replacing long-lived personal access tokens (PATs) with Okta-based session IDs, users benefit from enhanced security protocols, which reduces the risk of unauthorized access and improves operational oversight. This change demonstrates Chronosphere’s commitment to providing secure, reliable observability solutions.

Chronosphere has introduced a new feature for OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) metrics ingestion, enabling automatic merging of resource attributes with data point attributes. Previously, users had to manually configure resource attributes or write complex PromQL join queries to filter time series by these attributes. This update simplifies the setup and reduces maintenance by automatically merging these attributes, enhancing the efficiency of metric processing. Additionally, users can customize this behavior through Chronoctl or Terraform, providing flexibility to meet various use cases and preferences.

This enhancement is particularly beneficial for organizations using OpenTelemetry for observability, as it streamlines the ingestion process and reduces configuration overhead. By merging resource attributes automatically, Chronosphere improves the clarity and usability of metric data, allowing users to focus on analysis and decision-making without worrying about cumbersome setup procedures. 

Chronosphere has launched the new Histogram Metric Type, enhancing support for OpenTelemetry exponential histograms and Prometheus native histograms. This feature simplifies the configuration process by representing histograms as single data points, eliminating the need for multiple time series and reducing the complexity of managing histogram data. It supports various bucket layouts, including exponential growth, and provides full platform integration from ingestion to visualization, ensuring accurate and cost-effective metric handling.

This update is particularly beneficial for organizations seeking to improve their observability practices. The new metric type allows for seamless aggregation, accurate representation of histogram data, and comprehensive support across the Chronosphere Observability Platform. Users can now efficiently manage and visualize metrics in exponential histograms without manual configuration, enhancing their ability to monitor and analyze performance metrics effectively. 

Chronosphere has released Trace Control Behaviors, which simplifies the management and scheduling of trace sampling changes without the need to write complex sampling rules. This feature allows users to apply pre-configured behaviors such as “allow,” “deny,” or “baseline” to trace datasets. Users can quickly and easily set sampling behaviors via the UI or API, making it straightforward to adapt to changing conditions and ensuring that the most relevant trace data is collected.

This update is particularly useful for organizations needing to manage trace data dynamically. By enabling scheduled and reversible behaviors, users can control the volume and relevance of collected traces efficiently. This prevents budget overruns and ensures critical data is captured for debugging and analysis. This feature highlights Chronosphere’s commitment to making observability more accessible and controllable for all users, regardless of their technical expertise.

As we wrap up this month’s feature roundup, we’re excited to share these enhancements designed to streamline your experience with Chronosphere. From secure programmatic access and auto-merging OTLP metric attributes to the new Histogram Metric Type and simplified trace sampling management, each update is rolled out to improve how you interact with our platform. We’re committed to continuously advancing our solutions to better serve your observability needs. Stay tuned for future updates as we continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible in data observability and management.