Your liveness and readiness HTTP endpoints can generate a bunch of useless Spans and can mess with your latency metrics. On this post we’ll learn how to configure Kamon Telemetry to completely ignore these enpoints for good.

Today we are introducing Local Tail-Based sampling in Kamon Telemetry! We are going to tell you all about it in a little bit but before that, let’s take a couple minutes to explore what is sampling, how it is used nowadays, and what motivated us to including local tail sampling in Kamon Telemetry.

After years of helping developers monitor and debug their production systems, we couldn’t help but notice a pattern across many of them: they roughly know that metrics and traces should help them get the answers they need, but they are unfamiliar with how metrics and traces work, and how they fit into the bigger observability world. This post is an introduction to how we see observability in practice, and a loose roadmap for exploring observability concepts in the posts to come.

If you already had some experience with Kamon, you probably saw Kamon create Spans automatically for a lot of stuff, including HTTP server requests, database calls, actor messages, and more. But what happens when you want to create Spans for methods or code blocks that Kamon doesn’t instrument automatically? Let’s look at the two simplest ways to create Spans programmatically with Kamon.

In this article we discuss the origin story of Kamon’s Range Samplers: what they are, how they work, and how we use them to monitor queues, connection pools and more.

Kamon APM wakes up today with a new home page for all your observability data: the all-new Kamon APM Service Map! The Service Map shows a real-time representation of all your microservices and the dependencies between them, combined with health status and easy access to the most important bits of data from your entire infrastructure.

Dear community, Kamon 2.0 is out and ready to roll! For this release we focused primarily on simplifying the installation proces and making sure that the core APIs are more solid and user friendly, since they will be the foundations upon which we will instrument the whole JVM world in the months to come!

We are pleased to announce the availability of Kamon APM, a hosted APM solution built from the ground up to work nicely with Kamon and along with it we are launching a Free Starter Plan. Starting today there are no excuses for your team to say that you can’t have metrics and distributed tracing in production becase, well, you can get it for free!