opentelemetry-examples VS magic-trace

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.

I really like magic-trace [0].

https://github.com/janestreet/magic-trace

Not that the exact tracing relies on Intel PT - support for AMD was added recently but uses perf so suffers from the same sampling/skew issues, but is still very useful.

Would love to see this integrate with magic trace [1]. I'll need to look at the code for the flamegraph plugin, because handling nanosecond timestamps in flamegraphs seems to break most tools due to float precision.

(1) https://github.com/janestreet/magic-trace

As for inner workings, have you looked into magic trace? I want to play around with it but last I checked, it doesn't work on macs.

I really hope he can work with cloud vendors and Intel to make Processor Trace a more popular and easier to use capability.

It's unfortunate how https://github.com/janestreet/magic-trace and PMUs in general can't be used by lots of people using cloud VMs.

Magic-trace – High-resolution traces of what a process is doing\ (133 comments)