Last night was the London Oracle Developer Meetup’s sessions around observability.  Andrei Cioaca with a focus on the use of OpenTracing as provided by Jaeger, in a standard Kubernetes deployment with Istio – realized with Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE).  This was followed by my session on another pillar using logging via FluentD. Also incorporated into standard Kubernetes, but also able to support traditional monolithic use cases.

@andreicioaca starts talking about Oracle #Kubernetes #OKE #istio and #OpenTracing at the #OracleDeveloperMeetup #London @PaaSCommunity pic.twitter.com/HISzpmxjaN

— Phil Wilkins (@PhilConsultant) September 9, 2019

Andrei provided a great overview of the 3 pillars and the strengths and weaknesses of the different pillars. With the basics covered Andrei then dove into the configuration and execution of Istio combined with Jaeger and the corresponding insights available.  including a look at the kinds of visual insights that Jaeger and Kiali provide.  Some probing conversations followed about the relationship to Spring Cloud Sleuth, Open Zipkin and the OpenTracing as a concept more generally.

Andrei’s presentation material can be found in his GitHub repository here.

My session followed a pizza break, as there was a delay in its arrival. With everybody having chatted over pizza about OpenTracing, we picked up on FluentD and the Logging aspect to Observability. FluentD, as an open-source project has been growing steadily, and actually baked into several Log Analytics products and services – as the above analytics from Google shows.

The presentation looked at the growing challenges of modern software in terms of making sense of logging.  We explored the capabilities of FluentD before drilling into real-world use cases and potential deployment models.

As you’ll see from the slides we ran a couple of demos. The configuration for the demos can be found at https://github.com/mp3monster/fluentd-demos along with an example payload.

The next meetup we have organized is around Blockchain, all the details can be found at https://www.meetup.com/Oracle-Developer-Meetup-London/events/264661742/.

Other related info …

• Mastering Distributed Tracing – book review
• Article direct to LinkedIn – OpenTracing and API Gateways