Distributed tracing is a method of tracking requests as they propagate through a distributed system. A trace is built from spans. Each span represents an interaction, like an HTTP request, a DB query, a serverless function invocation, etc. A trace is essentially a tree of spans. Based on the collected span data, a distributed tracing platform can capture all the interactions between the different architectural components and tie them together with a trace ID.

Monitoring Solr is very critical because it handles the search and analysis of data in your application. Similifying this monitoring is necessary to gain full visibility into Solr’s availability and ensure it is performing as expectedn. We’ll show you how to do this using the jmxreceiver for the OpenTelemetry collector. You can utilize this receiver in conjunction with any OTel collector: including the OpenTelemetry Collector and observIQ’s distribution of the collector.

In this post, we’ll look at how you can use OpenTelemetry to monitor your unit tests and send that data to Honeycomb to visualize. It’s important to note that you don’t need to adopt Honeycomb, or even OpenTelemetry, in your production application to get the benefit of tracing. This example uses OpenTelemetry purely in the test project and provides great insights into our customer’s code. We’re going to use xUnit as the runner and framework for our tests.

OpenTracing was an open-source project developed to provide vendor-neutral APIs and instrumentation for distributed tracing across a variety of environments. As it is often extremely difficult for engineers to see the behaviour of requests when they are working across services in a distributed environment, OpenTracing aimed to provide a solution to heighten observability.

OpenTelemetry is a collection of APIs, SDKs, and libraries that provide an open source observability framework for instrumenting, generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry data like metrics, traces, and logs. It is incubated under Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the same foundation which incubated Kubernetes. OpenTelemetry is quietly becoming the world standard for instrumenting cloud-native applications.

OpenTelemetry is a free and open-source software initiative with the objective of supplying software developers with the means to create distributed systems. OpenTelemetry was developed by engineers at Google, and developers have the ability to utilize it to create a standard foundation for the construction of distributed systems. The goal is to enable developers to write code once and then deploy it in any location of their choosing.

OpenTelemetry is a collection of tools and APIs for collecting, processing, and exporting telemetry data from software. It is used to instrument applications for performance monitoring, logging, tracking, tracing, and other observability purposes. What is Telemetry? The word is derived from the Greek “tele” meaning “remote,” and metron meaning “measure.” So, it’s the collection of metrics and their automatic to a receiver for monitoring.

The scenario: you want to see distributed traces, maybe for your web app. You’ve set up an OpenTelemetry collector to receive OTLP traces in JSON over HTTP, and send those to Honeycomb (how to do that is another post, and we’ll link it here when it’s up).