fluent-bit VS jaeger

Fluentbit

$ docker run --rm fluent-bit-dummy WARNING: The requested image's platform (linux/amd64) does not match the detected host platform (linux/arm64/v8) and no specific platform was requested Fluent Bit v1.9.10 * Copyright (C) 2015-2022 The Fluent Bit Authors * Fluent Bit is a CNCF sub-project under the umbrella of Fluentd * https://fluentbit.io [2023/12/24 16:06:59] [ info] [fluent bit] version=1.9.10, commit=557c8336e7, pid=1 [2023/12/24 16:06:59] [ info] [storage] version=1.4.0, type=memory-only, sync=normal, checksum=disabled, max_chunks_up=128 [2023/12/24 16:06:59] [ info] [cmetrics] version=0.3.7 [2023/12/24 16:06:59] [ info] [output:stdout:stdout.0] worker #0 started [2023/12/24 16:06:59] [ info] [sp] stream processor started [0] dummy.0: [1703434019.553880465, {"message"=>"custom dummy"}] [0] dummy.0: [1703434020.555768799, {"message"=>"custom dummy"}] [0] dummy.0: [1703434021.550525174, {"message"=>"custom dummy"}] [0] dummy.0: [1703434022.551563050, {"message"=>"custom dummy"}] [0] dummy.0: [1703434023.551944509, {"message"=>"custom dummy"}] [0] dummy.0: [1703434024.550027843, {"message"=>"custom dummy"}] [0] dummy.0: [1703434025.550901801, {"message"=>"custom dummy"}] [0] dummy.0: [1703434026.549279385, {"message"=>"custom dummy"}] ^C[2023/12/24 16:07:08] [engine] caught signal (SIGINT) [0] dummy.0: [1703434027.549678344, {"message"=>"custom dummy"}] [2023/12/24 16:07:08] [ warn] [engine] service will shutdown in max 5 seconds [2023/12/24 16:07:08] [ info] [engine] service has stopped (0 pending tasks) [2023/12/24 16:07:08] [ info] [output:stdout:stdout.0] thread worker #0 stopping... [2023/12/24 16:07:08] [ info] [output:stdout:stdout.0] thread worker #0 stopped

> Libc is a lot more tricky about signals, since not all libc functions can be safely called from handlers.

And this is a huge thing. People do all kinds of operations in signal handlers completely oblivious to the pitfalls. Pitfalls which often do not manifest, making it a great "it works for me" territory.

I once raised a ticket on fluentbit[1] about it but they have abused signal handlers so thoroughly that I do not think they can mitigate the issue without a major rewriting of the signal and crash handling.

[1] https://github.com/fluent/fluent-bit/issues/4836

Fluentbit is Fluentd's lightweight alternative to itself.

https://fluentbit.io

From here, we can explore other developments and tutorials on Kubernetes, such as o11y or observability (PLG, ELK, ELF, TICK, Jaeger, Pyroscope), service mesh (Linkerd, Istio, NSM, Consul Connect, Cillium), and progressive delivery (ArgoCD, FluxCD, Spinnaker).

From this (https://github.com/fluent/fluent-bit/issues/723), I can see there is no grok support for fluent-bit.

apiVersion: v1 kind: ConfigMap metadata: name: fluent-bit-config namespace: newrelic labels: k8s-app: newrelic-logging data: # Configuration files: server, input, filters and output # ====================================================== fluent-bit.conf: | [SERVICE] Flush 1 Log_Level ${LOG_LEVEL} Daemon off Parsers_File parsers.conf HTTP_Server On HTTP_Listen 0.0.0.0 HTTP_Port 2020 @INCLUDE input-kubernetes.conf @INCLUDE output-newrelic.conf @INCLUDE filter-kubernetes.conf input-kubernetes.conf: | [INPUT] Name tail Tag kube.* Path ${PATH} Parser ${LOG_PARSER} DB /var/log/flb_kube.db Mem_Buf_Limit 7MB Skip_Long_Lines On Refresh_Interval 10 filter-kubernetes.conf: | [FILTER] Name multiline Match * multiline.parser multiline-regex [FILTER] Name record_modifier Match * Record cluster_name ${CLUSTER_NAME} [FILTER] Name kubernetes Match kube.* Kube_URL https://kubernetes.default.svc.cluster.local:443 Merge_Log Off output-newrelic.conf: | [OUTPUT] Name newrelic Match * licenseKey ${LICENSE_KEY} endpoint ${ENDPOINT} parsers.conf: | # Relevant parsers retrieved from: https://github.com/fluent/fluent-bit/blob/master/conf/parsers.conf [PARSER] Name docker Format json Time_Key time Time_Format %Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%L Time_Keep On [PARSER] Name cri Format regex Regex ^(?[^ ]+) (?stdout|stderr) (?[^ ]*) (?.*)$ Time_Key time Time_Format %Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%L%z [MULTILINE_PARSER] name multiline-regex key_content message type regex flush_timeout 1000 # # Regex rules for multiline parsing # --------------------------------- # # configuration hints: # # - first state always has the name: start_state # - every field in the rule must be inside double quotes # # rules | state name | regex pattern | next state # ------|---------------|--------------------------------|----------- rule "start_state" "/(Dec \d+ \d+\:\d+\:\d+)(.*)/" "cont" rule "cont" "/^\s+at.*/" "cont"

There are also log forwarding tools like promtail and fluentbit that can be used to both ship logs to something like Loki and produce metrics.

FluentBit, is a logging processor that can help you to push all of your application logs to a central location like an ElasticSearch or OpenSearch cluster.

Jaeger maps the flow of requests and data as they traverse a distributed system. These requests may make calls to multiple services, which may introduce their own delays or errors. https://www.jaegertracing.io/

As engineers at past startups, we often had to debug slow queries, poor load times, inconsistent errors, etc... While tools like Jaegar [2] helped us inspect server-side performance, we had no way to tie user events to the traces we were inspecting. In other words, although we had an idea of what API route was slow, there wasn’t much visibility into the actual bottleneck.

This is where our performance product comes in: we’re rethinking a tracing/performance tool that focuses on bridging the gap between the client and server.

What’s unique about our approach is that we lean heavily into creating traces from the frontend. For example, if you’re using our Next.js SDK, we automatically connect browser HTTP requests with server-side code execution, all from the perspective of a user. We find this much more powerful because you can understand what part of your frontend codebase causes a given trace to occur. There’s an example here [3].

From an instrumentation perspective, we’ve built our SDKs on-top of OTel, so you can create custom spans to expand highlight-created traces in server routes that will transparently roll up into the flame graph you see in our UI. You can also send us raw OTel traces and manually set up the client-server connection if you want. [4] Here’s an example of what a trace looks like with a database integration using our Golang GORM SDK, triggered by a frontend GraphQL query [5] [6].

In terms of how it's built, we continue to rely heavily on ClickHouse as our time-series storage engine. Given that traces require that we also query based on an ID for specific groups of spans (more akin to an OLTP db), we’ve leveraged the power of CH materialized views to make these operations efficient (described here [7]).

To try it out, you can spin up the project with our self hosted docs [8] or use our cloud offering at app.highlight.io. The entire stack runs in docker via a compose file, including an OpenTelemetry collector for data ingestion. You’ll need to point your SDK to export data to it by setting the relevant OTLP endpoint configuration (ie. environment variable OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_LOGS_ENDPOINT [9]).

Overall, we’d really appreciate feedback on what we’re building here. We’re also all ears if anyone has opinions on what they’d like to see in a product like this!

[1] https://github.com/highlight/highlight/blob/main/LICENSE

[2] https://www.jaegertracing.io

[3] https://app.highlight.io/1383/sessions/COu90Th4Qc3PVYTXbx9Xe...

[4] https://www.highlight.io/docs/getting-started/native-opentel...

[5] https://static.highlight.io/assets/docs/gorm.png

[6] https://github.com/highlight/highlight/blob/1fc9487a676409f1...

[7] https://highlight.io/blog/clickhouse-materialized-views

[8] https://www.highlight.io/docs/getting-started/self-host/self...

[9] https://opentelemetry.io/docs/concepts/sdk-configuration/otl...

For the request following, something like jeager https://www.jaegertracing.io/, because you are talking more about tracing than necessarily logging. For just monitoring, https://github.com/prometheus-community/helm-charts/tree/main/charts/kube-prometheus-stack would be the starting point, then it depends. Nginx gives metrics out of the box, then you can pull in the dashboard like https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/14314-kubernetes-nginx-ingress-controller-nextgen-devops-nirvana/ , or full metal with something like service mesh monitoring which would provably fulfil most of the requirements

Have you checked out Jaeger [1]? It is lightweight enough for a personal project, but featureful enough to really help "turn on the lightbulb" with other engineers to show them the difference between logging/monitoring and tracing.

[1] https://www.jaegertracing.io/

From the perspective of the realization of GraphQL infrastructure, the interesting direction is "Finding". How to find the problem? How to find the bottleneck of the system? Distributed Tracing System (DTS) will help answer this question. Distributed tracing is a method of observing requests as they propagate through distributed environments. In our scenario, we have dozens of subgraphs, gateway, and transport layer through which the request goes. We have several tools that can be used to detect the whole lifecycle of the request through the system, e.g. Jaeger, Zipkin or solutions that provided DTS as a part of the solution NewRelic.

Jaeger is an open-source, distributed tracing system that monitors and troubleshoots the flow of requests through complex, microservices-based applications, providing a comprehensive view of system interactions.

However, ensuring fault tolerance in distributed systems is not at all easy. These systems are complex, with multiple nodes or components working together. A failure in one node can cascade across the system if not addressed timely. Moreover, the inherently distributed nature of these systems can make it challenging to pinpoint the exact location and cause of fault - that is why modern systems rely heavily on distributed tracing solutions pioneered by Google Dapper and widely available now in Jaeger and OpenTracing. But still, understanding and implementing fault tolerance becomes not just about addressing the failure but predicting and mitigating potential risks before they escalate.

In this article, we'll use HoneyComb.io as our tracing backend. While there are other tools in the market, some of which can be run on your local machine (e.g., Jaeger), I chose HoneyComb because of their complementary tools that offer improved monitoring of the service and insights into its behavior.

The best way to do this, is with the help of tracing tools such as paid tools such as Honeycomb, or your own instance of the open source Jaeger offering, or perhaps Encore's built in tracing system.

In this example, I will create 3 Node.js services (shipping, notification, and courier) using Amplication, add traces to all services, and show how to analyze trace data using Jaeger.