Hawkular - CloudNativeCon summary

CloudNativeCon happened last week in Berlin and Hawkular APM was represented there with a talk, "Operational and Business Insights from Tracing Distributed Microservices". Here’s a short summary of the event, with a focus on OpenTracing.

This event was co-located with KubeCon and as you would expect, pretty much everything revolved around Kubernetes. There were quite a few tracing vendors with booths and/or in the audience: Instana, DataDog, Dynatrace, Sysdig, CA Technologies, among others. It was a great opportunity to talk to them, watch each others demos, exchange ideas and invite them to the OpenTracing community. A few of them have components which are similar in purpose to some that we are developing as part of "opentracing-contrib" and would be the perfect opportunity for a collaboration!

After the talk, we were able to answer some questions around OpenTracing and Hawkular APM. Those with good questions got "data containers and books". There was also quite some interest in OpenShift: most people knew about it already and among those who didn’t, most seemed impressed by its user interface once presented to it.

On the last day, there was a Distributed Tracing Salon: in this workshop, people were able to get started with OpenTracing by using a demo application written in Go and adding instrumentation to it. The final goal was to see the traces on Zipkin’s user interface, and I believe most participants reached the goal! Those who didn’t could continue working on it after the workshop, as the source code is available on GitHub.

It was also a great opportunity to meet some OpenTracing members from LightStep, and I made sure to smuggle a few stickers and T-Shirts back to Munich, to be distributed during meetup talks there. All the videos from this conference, including the ones from the OpenTracing track, can be watched on YouTube.

What’s the overhead? Hint: As OpenTracing is a specification and API, the overhead is dependent on the concrete implementation.
Multiplexer: sending traces to more than one backend seems to be a common use-case.
Should the "wire transport" be part of the specification?
Should an export format, like pcap, be part of the specification?
What can be used for "reacting" on data (alerting)? Hint: Hawkular Alerts is a great alternative and can be used as a standalone solution!

And you, what’s your opinion on the questions related to the specification? Join the OpenTracing community and make your opinion count!