apm-server VS skywalking

🌐 Website 💻 GitHub

Personally I've also used Apache Skywalking for a decent out of the box experience: https://skywalking.apache.org/

I've also heard good things about Sentry, though if you need to self-host it, then there's a bit of complexity to deal with: https://sentry.io/welcome/

Next characteristic of a good API Gateway is effortless integration with more ecosystems. You need to check if it is integrated with other products, tools, platforms, and services. For example, you can investigate if supports several application protocols, and compatibility with third-party identity providers for authentication, and if it provides pre-built connectors that you can easily integrate with Most observability platforms like (Prometheus, Skywalking, ElasticSearch, Opentelemetry, and so on).

For me, Apache Skywalking feels "good enough", although definitely not perfect: https://skywalking.apache.org/

The Docker Compose stack for it doesn't look as complicated as that of Sentry, it's basically an almost monolithic piece of software like Zabbix is and it works okay. The UI is reasonably sane to navigate and you have agents that you can connect with most popular languages out there.

That said, the UI sometimes feels a bit janky, the documentation isn't exactly ideal and the community could definitely be bigger (niche language support). Also, ElasticSearch as the data store feels too resource intensive, I wonder if I could move to MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL for smaller amounts of data.

Then again, if I could make monitoring and observability someone else's problem, I'd prosper more, so it depends on your circumstances.

For example, Apache APISIX can also integrate with a variety of observability platforms like Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Apache Skywalking and etc. by using its connector plugins 🔌 to further analyze API performance and gain complete visibility.

Technically, you can also use Skywalking for log aggregation, but personally the setup isn't as great and their log view UI is a bit awkward (e.g. it's not easy to preview all logs for a particular service/instance in a file-like view), see the demo: https://skywalking.apache.org/

For logs in particular, Graylog feels reasonably sane, since it has a similarly "manageable" amount of components, for a configuration example see: https://docs.graylog.org/docs/docker#settings

Contrast that to some of the more popular solutions out there, like Sentry, which gets way more complicated really quickly: https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/master/docker-...

For most of the people who have to deal with self-hosted setups where you might benefit from something like tracing or log shipping, actually getting the platform up and running will be an uphill battle, especially if not everyone sees the value in setting something like this up, or setting aside enough resources for it. Sometimes people will be more okay with having no idea why a system goes down randomly, rather than administering something like this constantly and learning new approaches, instead of just rotating a bunch of files.

For others, there are no such worries, because they can open their wallets (without worrying about certain regulations and where their data can be stored, hopefully) and have some cloud provider give them a workable solution, so they just need to integrate their apps with some agent for shipping the information.

For others yet, throwing the requirement over to some other team who's supposed to provide such platform components for them is also a possibility.

This seems like a pretty cool project!

Currently using Apache Skywalking myself, because it's reasonably simple to get up and running, as well as integrate with some of the more popular stacks: https://skywalking.apache.org/

I do wonder how ClickHouse (which Uptrace uses) would compare with something like ElasticSearch (which is used by Skywalking and some others) and how badly/well an attempt to use something like MariaDB/MySQL/PostgreSQL for a similar workload would actually go.

I previously used https://k6.io/ in lieu of better options. It was great for getting up and running reasonably quickly, but also kind of had a weird JS runtime so the error messages weren't always intuitive so debugging was a pain.

Then again, could also use anything like Apache JMeter (https://jmeter.apache.org/), Gatling (https://gatling.io/open-source/) or any other solution out there, whichever is better suited for the on-prem/cloud use case.

That said, when time was limited and I literally didn't have the time to figure out how to test WebSocket connections and which resources the test should load, I literally cooked up a container image with Selenium (https://www.selenium.dev/) with Firefox/Chrome as a fully automated browser, for 1:1 behavior as real users would interact with the site.

That was a horrible decision from a memory usage point of view, but an excellent one from time-saving and data quality perspectives, because the behavior was just like having 100-1000 users clicking through the site.

Apart from that, you probably want something to aggregate the performance data of the app, be it something like Apache Skywalking (https://skywalking.apache.org/) or even Sentry (https://sentry.io/welcome/). Then you can probably ramp up the tests slowly over time in regards to how many parallel instances are generating load and see how the app reacts - the memory usage, CPU load, how many DB queries are done etc.

Haven't used it too much, but keeping an eye in this space. So far Skywalking [0] looks promising.

[0] - https://skywalking.apache.org/

Apache Sky Walking is a powerful, distributed performance and log analysis platform. It can monitor applications written in .NET Core, Java, PHP, Node.js, Golang, LUA, C++, and Python. It supports cloud integration and contains features like performance optimization, slow service and endpoint detection, service topology map analysis, and much more. See the feature map in the image below: