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Tracing

The latest News and Information on Distributed Tracing and related technologies.

Ask Miss O11y: Making Sense of OpenTelemetry-Context

“What is up with the Context in OpenTelemetry? Why do I need to mess with it at all? Why, when I set a span as active, don’t subsequent spans just use it as a parent?” Oh, yikes, yeah. The Context abstraction in OpenTelemetry is hard to understand. Here are several ways it’s tricky.

Usual Performance Suspects: Introducing Suspect Spans

A trace is the end-to-end journey of one or more connected spans and a span is an operation or “work” taking place on a service. So when it comes to debugging a performance issue, being able to pick out slow spans out of a line up is the fastest way to seeing the root cause and knowing how to solve it. Suspect Spans surfaces a list of spans that correspond to where the most time in a transaction is spent.

Ask Miss O11y: Making Sense of OpenTelemetry-Tracer and TracerProvider

OpenTelemetry is a strong standard for instrumentation because it is built of careful, well-thought-out abstractions created by experts in the space. OpenTelemetry feels painful to start using because it’s full of abstractions that make sense to experts in the space. For a developer who wants to think about their own software and not spend a month becoming an expert in telemetry, this is hard. For high-level conceptual description, there’s the OpenTelemetry specification.

How to Configure the Opentelemetry Collector to Begin Collecting Metrics

OpenTelemetry enables Observability, and building observable systems requires you to understand the various ways in which they can fail. Jumping from one possible fix to another and one change to another without fully recognizing the impact on the system can be a significant hindrance to a successful customer experience. In this post, I’ll explain how to get started with OpenTelemetry to help you make your systems more observable.

Code coverage for eBPF programs

I bet we all have heard so much about eBPF in recent years. Data shows that eBPF is quickly becoming the first choice for implementing tracing and security applications, and Elastic is also working relentlessly on supercharging our security solutions (and more) with eBPF. However, one major challenge is that the eBPF ecosystem lacks tooling to make developers' lives easier. eBPF programs are written in C but compiled for a specific ISA later executed by the eBPF Virtual Machine.

What is OpenTelemetry and Why is Scout All In?

Before we talk about OpenTelemetry, we should talk about telemetry. Telemetry is: And an instrument is: For the purpose of measuring running computer software and systems, our instruments are virtual instruments. That is to say, code that measures other code. It sounds simple: read a measurement and send it to a remote location. In practice, to make that telemetry data useful in today’s cloud-native and ever more complex environments, there are huge logistical and technical hurdles to overcome.

Tutorial: Auto-instrumentation of a Java app by OpenTelemetry for K8s Environment

This tutorial demonstrates how to auto-instrument a Java app by OpenTelemetry for Kuberenetes easily with the help of a sample Java app. It also shows how to connect it to the hosted collector, and trace the transactions in Sumo Logic. Learn the prerequisites and the detailed step-by-step auto-instrumentation process in this tutorial. Reference Links: Links to refer to or download useful material to try the steps independently.

What is Distributed Tracing? Key Concepts and Definition

Back in the day, monitoring applications from end to end was—for the most part—significantly easier than it is today. Though the basics of instrumentation and observability for metrics like CPU, memory, and I/O throughput haven’t changed, the way applications are built has changed significantly. There were, at most, a handful of application servers and likely a single database server.