opentelemetry-examples VS keptn

We focused on the observability ecosystem and took the time to interact with our friends from Lightstep, New Relic, Honeycomb, Dynatrace, Instana, and many more. With that in mind, keep an eye out for more integrations coming to Tracetest!

Lightstep bills itself as a platform for the reliability of cloud-native applications. The people behind Lightstep co-founded OpenTelemetry and OpenTracing, which gives them a unique perspective on the use cases of distributed tracing and the value of having a vendor-neutral tracing data format.

In the last 5 to 10 years, new Observability vendors have entered the market, including Honeycomb, Instana, Lightstep and Datadog. Similarly, traditional APM vendors such as Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic, as well as SIEM (and log management) vendors such as Splunk and Sumo Logic, have joined them in the Observability space too. Finally you also have major cloud providers such as AWS with their own observability solution. Each of them is attempting to address the observability issues that modern architecture presents by using Logs, Metrics, Traces, and Events.

I spent Day 2 at the Colony Club to attend OTel Unplugged. This event was sponsored by Lightstep, Honeycomb, New Relic, Splunk, Dynatrace, Crowdstrike, and NGINX. I came into the event not knowing what to expect. I can sometimes clamp up when I’m around folks that I don’t know, but because I was helping with the event check-in, I got to say hello to a number of the attendees, which helped break the ice. And it turns out that there were a lot of names that I recognized from my work in the OTel community, and it was nice to connect in person with folks whom I’d only previously met through Slack or Zoom.

The example in this tutorial can be found in the lightstep/opentelemetry-examples repo. We will be working with three main files:

Note how we don’t have to set a LS_ACCESS_TOKEN, since that’s already configured in the Collector’s config.yml file. Just make sure that you have a running OTel Collector instance!

Note: If you’re looking for full code listings, don’t panic! You see them in the Lightstep OTel examples repository.

One of the other places I spent a lot of time at at KubeCon NA was the CNCF Project Pavillion. I was very happy to see that it was a bit larger than the area we had during KubeCon EU, but I still wish that it was bigger and wasn’t so tucked away in the corner. A number of booths were showcasing their projects with demos through the week, hosted Q&A time, and gave away swag. If you are still trying to understand the Cloud Native Ecosystem, you can look at this very extensive map of the landscape and projects under the CNCF, some of which are more advanced than others. Of course I’m biased, but I’m really excited for the work that Keptn is doing in helping developers have more control over their application lifecycle. I’m also very excited to see where Backstage goes and how other CNCF projects can integrate with their service catalog.

I can’t speak from experience, but I think Keptn might be worth looking into: https://keptn.sh/

Go try this out and share your feedback on what you like about this integration and what you’d like improved. Feel free to create issues, engage in discussions on the Keptn Slack and Litmus Github repository. Stay tuned for more updates on how you can leverage Keptn & LitmusChaos CNCF projects to build and ship resilient cloud-native applications!

If you want, you can also manually download the binary file from Github and install the CLI by moving it into your path.