Day 18: Distributed Tracing with OpenTelemetry

Welcome to Day 18 of the Zero to Platform Engineer in 30 Days challenge! 🚀 Today, we’re diving into Distributed Tracing using OpenTelemetry, an essential tool for monitoring request flows across microservices.

Why Use Distributed Tracing?

In a microservices architecture, tracing helps:

• Understand request flows across multiple services.
• Detect performance bottlenecks in applications.
• Correlate logs, metrics, and traces for better debugging.

🎯 Key Benefits:

• Provides end-to-end visibility across distributed systems.
• Helps pinpoint slow API calls and database queries.
• Standardizes tracing across multiple languages and frameworks.

What Is OpenTelemetry?

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is an open-source observability framework that standardizes:

• Tracing: Capturing request flows.
• Metrics: Collecting application performance data.
• Logs: Providing detailed event tracking.

💡 OTel is supported by Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, Datadog, AWS X-Ray, and more!

Hands-On: Setting Up OpenTelemetry in Kubernetes

Step 1: Deploy OpenTelemetry Collector

1. Add the OpenTelemetry Helm repository:

helm repo add open-telemetry https://open-telemetry.github.io/opentelemetry-helm-charts
helm repo update

2. Install OpenTelemetry Collector:

helm install otel-collector open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector --namespace monitoring --create-namespace

3. Verify the installation:

kubectl get pods -n monitoring

Step 2: Instrumenting a Microservice

1. Add OpenTelemetry SDK to your application. Example for Python:

pip install opentelemetry-sdk opentelemetry-exporter-otlp

2. Modify your application to send traces:

from opentelemetry import trace
from opentelemetry.sdk.trace import TracerProvider
from opentelemetry.exporter.otlp.proto.grpc.trace_exporter import OTLPSpanExporter
from opentelemetry.sdk.trace.export import SimpleSpanProcessor

tracer_provider = TracerProvider()
tracer_provider.add_span_processor(SimpleSpanProcessor(OTLPSpanExporter(endpoint="http://otel-collector:4317")))

trace.set_tracer_provider(tracer_provider)
tracer = trace.get_tracer(__name__)

with tracer.start_as_current_span("zero-eng-tracing"):
    print("Tracing request flow...")

3. Deploy your application and verify traces are being collected.

Step 3: Visualizing Traces in Jaeger

1. Install Jaeger in your Kubernetes cluster:

helm install jaeger jaegertracing/jaeger --namespace monitoring

2. Forward Jaeger to your local machine:

kubectl port-forward svc/jaeger-query -n monitoring 16686:16686

3. Open Jaeger UI:

👉 http://localhost:16686

4. Search for traces related to your application.

Step 4: Integrating Traces with Grafana

1. Add OpenTelemetry as a data source in Grafana.
2. Import a pre-built tracing dashboard (ID: 14932).
3. View distributed traces alongside Prometheus metrics.

Activity for Today

1. Deploy OpenTelemetry Collector in Kubernetes.
2. Instrument a microservice with OpenTelemetry.
3. Visualize distributed traces in Jaeger.

What’s Next?

Tomorrow, we’ll explore Chaos Engineering to test system resilience and failure handling.

👉 Check it out here: Zero to Platform Engineer Repository

Feel free to clone the repo, experiment with the code, and even contribute if you’d like! 🚀

Follow the Series!

🎉 Don’t miss a single step in your journey to becoming a Platform Engineer! 🎉

This post is just the beginning. Here’s what we’ve covered so far and what’s coming up next:

• Day 0: Introduction - What’s Platform Engineering?

• Day 1: Introduction to the CNCF Landscape

• Day 2: Day 2: Containers and Docker - The Building Blocks of Cloud Native

• Day 3: Containers and Kubernetes - The Building Blocks of Cloud Native

• Day 4: Deployments and Scaling in Kubernetes - Let’s Get Practical

• Day 5: Kubernetes Services – Connecting Your Applications

• Day 6: ConfigMaps and Secrets – Managing Configurations in Kubernetes

• Day 7: Recap and Hands-On Challenges for Week 1

• Day 8: Introduction to Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

• Day 9: Advanced Terraform – Managing Kubernetes Resources

• Day 10: Managing Kubernetes with Helm and Terraform

• Day 11: Introduction to GitOps with ArgoCD

• Day 12: Advanced GitOps with Argo Rollouts

👉 Bookmark this blog and check back every day for new posts in the series. 📣 Share your progress on social media with the hashtag #ZeroToPlatformEngineer to connect with other readers!