opentracing-javascript VS jaeger

Spring Spring web framework Spring WebFlux Reactive REST Services Spring Data R2DBC a specification to integrate SQL databases using reactive drivers Redisson Redis Java Client Zipkin open source, end-to-end distributed tracing Spring Cloud Sleuth auto-configuration for distributed tracing Prometheus monitoring and alerting Grafana for to compose observability dashboards with everything from Prometheus Kubernetes automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications Docker and docker-compose Helm The package manager for Kubernetes Flywaydb for migrations

Elasticsearch client for Go RabbitMQ Go RabbitMQ Client Library Jaeger open source, end-to-end distributed tracing Prometheus monitoring and alerting Grafana for to compose observability dashboards with everything from Prometheus Echo web framework Kibana is user interface that lets you visualize your Elasticsearch Docker and docker-compose Kubernetes K8s Helm The package manager for Kubernetes

PostgeSQL as event store database Kafka as messages broker gRPC Go implementation of gRPC Jaeger open source, end-to-end distributed tracing Prometheus monitoring and alerting Grafana for to compose observability dashboards with everything from Prometheus MongoDB MongoDB database Elasticsearch Elasticsearch client for Go. Echo web framework Kibana Kibana is data visualization dashboard software for Elasticsearch Migrate for migrations

OpenTracing was an open-source project aimed at providing vendor-neutral APIs and instrumentation for distributed tracing. In distributed cloud-native applications, it is difficult for engineering teams to see how requests are performing across services. And that’s where distributed tracing comes into the picture.

OpenTracing is now archived, and it is suggested to migrate to OpenTelemetry.

In this article let's try to create closer to real world Event Sourcing CQRS microservice using: 🚀👨‍💻🙌 EventStoreDB The database built for Event Sourcing gRPC Go implementation of gRPC MongoDB Web and API based SMTP testing Elasticsearch Elasticsearch client for Go. Jaeger open source, end-to-end distributed tracing Prometheus monitoring and alerting Grafana for to compose observability dashboards with everything from Prometheus swag Swagger for Go Echo web framework Kibana Kibana is user interface that lets you visualize your Elasticsearch

I agree; but I think it'll take years, if ever, to change this culture.

Logging is a byproduct of a past time; everything is a file, stdout is a file, lets persist that file, now we have multiple replicas, lets collect the file into a multi-terabyte searchable database.

The biggest downside: Its WILDLY expensive. Large orgs often have an entire team dedicated to maintaining logging (ELK) infrastructure. This price-tag inevitably leads to bikeshedding on backend teams about how to "reduce the amount we're logging" or "cleaning up the logs" or "structuring them to be more useful".

Outside of development, they are so rarely useful. Yet inevitably someone will say: "you're just not structuring your logs correctly." Maybe that's true; similarly, I don't find vim to be a highly productive editing experience. Maybe I just don't have the thousands of extensions it would take to make it so. Or maybe You're stuck in the past and ignoring two decades of tooling improvement. Both can be true.

I'm phrasing this as a false dichotomy, because in many teams: it is. Logging is easy; its built-in to most languages; so devs log. The information we need is in the system; its a needle in a haystack, but the needle is there. We log when a request comes in, when it hits pertinent functions, when its finished, how its finished, the manager says: "just look at the logs". Instead of "what better tooling can we make an investment in so future investigations of this nature don't take a full day."

For starters: Tracing. Tracing systems should be built-in to EVERY LANGUAGE, just like console.log. We have a standard [1] sponsored by the Linux Foundation and supported by every major trace ingestion system. This is not a problem of camps and proprietary systems; its a problem of culture. I should be able to call a nodejs stdlib function at startup, specify where I want traces to go, sampling rate, etc, and immediately get every single function call instrumented. Its literally just highly-structured-by-default logging! Dump the spans to stdout by default! Our log ingestion systems can read each line, determine if its a span, if so route to trace ingestion, otherwise route to log ingestion.

This is a critical step because it asserts that tracing is actually a very powerful tool that everyone needs to learn, like logging. Everyone knows about logging. Why? console.log. Its there, it gets used. Tracing right now is relegated to a subculture of "advanced diagnostics"; you gotta adopt a tracing provider, bring in dependencies, learn each implementation of OpenTracing, authenticate to send traces over HTTP... as a community, we should normalize just "dump traces like you dump logs, to stdout", have a formatter to make them nice to use in development, and now all that instrumentation work that any dev is capable of utilizing (just like console.log) "just works" in production.

[1] https://opentracing.io/

Service mesh - ssup2ket services run on service mesh for detailed traffic control and easy monitoring. Service mesh is applied through Istio. Istio uses OpenTracing for easy request tracing between multiple services.

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.