open tracing | Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog

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CNCF, Jaeger, monitoring, open tracing, Tracing

So recently we have been working on ‘knowing what I don’t know’ when it comes to Open Tracing and how such tech may intersect with traditional logging and the use of FluentD.

As part of that, I have read the Packt book Mastering Distributed Tracing written by Yuri Shkuro who has been key in the OpenTracing API and Jaeger and is the technical lead for Uber’s tracing team.

Whilst I have a good relationship with Packt, the fact they published the book is pretty much coincidental.

Understanding tracing over traditional logging is very important when moving into the world of microservices and reactive frameworks such as Node.js where threads are picked up and put down, you don’t know where and when the next service in a solution will pick up the next related activity. When you add to this solutions are more polyglot than ever – not only in the sense of different languages that may be used but a more diverse source of middle features e.g. historically you’d probably use JMS based messaging if you’re a Java developer and MSMQ for .net. Now you may be using AWS SNS as easily as Kafka. This means the mechanisms for passing and tracing events through these services need to be more unifying than ever.

Complexity of Observability

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developer, GitHub, Helidon, meetup, micro profile, Microservices, open tracing, Oracle, signatures

Last night was the first Oracle Developer Meetup in London for 2019. We were very fortunate to have Tomas Langer fly over to talk about the new micro container/framework being developed as an open-source solution by Oracle.

Tomas, opened by explaining the evolution of the micro-profile being championed by the Eclipse Foundation who are now the guardians of J2EE also known as Jakarta and how the J2EE and Micro-Profile standards compare (in simplistic terms – micro-profile is J2EE stripped back to be simple and support what is typically needed in a micro-service world).

The presentation then went onto compare Helidon SE and Helidon MP (micro-profile). What was really pleasing is that with a couple of exceptions everything that Helidon MP can do, can be done in the SE edition, the difference being that for SE you have to implement more code, rather than the auto-magic of annotations, but in return you have a Reactive Java platform with a development paradigm which relates to JavaScript Express.

In addition to talking about what can be done, Tomas described the kinds of features being developed, this includes:

Bringing micro-profile support up to the very latest specification,
More reactive persistence technologies support,

With the scene set, Tomas then worked through a series of live code scenarios starting with a clean slate and building Hello World in both the SE & MP models illustrating the differences in approach. This was then built upon to add the following capabilities:

Tracing (using Zipkin leveraging the Open Tracing Standard)
Dynamic configuration
Security (including Signatures)
Fault Handling (just MP)

You can get the complete example which uses Helidon in both configurations from Tomas GitHub.

In addition to Helidon itself on GitHub, there are resources provided include rich documentation and examples of each key feature. Plus a Slack community, that if you contact any of the Helidon team will get you invited allowing you to discuss with the development team how to do things along with other developers using Helidon.

Tomas can be contracted via @Langer_Tomas. Helidon project also has its own Twitter account – Helidon Project

Helidon itself can be found at:

I have previously blogged on Helidon at Exploring Helidon – Part 1