Distributed tracing has become critical for application performance monitoring in microservice-based architecture. Jaeger is a popular open-source tool used for distributed tracing. With distributed tracing, engineering teams get a central overview of how user requests perform across multiple services.

As distributed environments become more complex, users often use distributed tracing tools to improve the visibility of issues evident within their traces. Throughout this post, we will examine some of the best open-source and other generally popular distributed tracing tools available today.

Bindplane OP is the first open source, vendor-agnostic, agent and pipeline management tool. It makes it easy to deploy, configure, and manage agents on thousands of sources, and ship metrics, logs, and traces to any destination. This blog shows you how to configure an existing OpenTelemetry Collector from any source to connect to Bindplane OP without needing to remove or reinstall the collector.

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.