OpenTelemetry with Quarkus to push distributed traces to AWS X-Ray

Distributed Tracing enables a DevOps team to observe user requests as they travel through multiple services and applications in a microservices landscape. It provides a centralized view of how user requests are performing across all involved services. Nowadays, a microservice architecture consists of many self-developed as well as hosted and preconfigured services such as API gateways, load balancers or databases. To get a deep insight into the overall microservice architecture, traces of self-developed microservices need to be combined with traces of hosted services. AWS X-Ray can be employed for this purpose, but it adds a vendor-specific javaagent to the application. Alternatively, OpenTelemetry can be used to get traces from self-developed applications and push them to AWS X-Ray. The result is similar, traces can be observed for the entire microservices landscape, but it avoids adding the AWS X-Ray javaagent to the self-developed application.

OpenTelemetry is the new shining star on the Observability horizon. It aims to standardize the three pillars of observability: Tracing, Logging, and Metrics. OpenTelemetry is a set of vendor-independent APIs and SDKs for collecting and exporting telemetry data. To obtain distributed traces of an application, only the general OpenTelemetry interface needs to be integrated without a vendor-specific implementation or library. The three major cloud providers, AWS, Azure and Google, already provide an interface from OpenTelemetry to their hosted tracing solutions. I expect OpenTelemetry to be the only widely used observability API in the future. It already provides good support for tracing and metrics, but they are still working on the specification for logging.

Leave a Comment