1. MARA
The Journey to OpenTelemetry
Jason Schmidt Solutions Architect
Elijah Zupancic Solutions Architect

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A Brief Introduction to
OpenTelemetry

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OpenTelemetry Benefits
Standards-based agents
Cloud integration
Automated code instrumentation
Support for developer frameworks
Any code, any time
No cardinality limits

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OpenTelemetry Core Concepts
● Tracing
○ Built from spans
○ Emitted by services
○ What is happening for a given operation
● Metrics
○ A measurement about a service, captured at runtime
○ Consists of counters, measures, and observers
● Logging
○ A timestamped text record
○ Can be structured or unstructured
● Baggage
○ Key/Value format
○ Contextual data
○ Passed between spans

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OpenTelemetry Core Components
● Specification
○ OTLP Protocol
○ API Definition
○ SDK Requirements
● Collector
○ Vendor agnostic
○ Receive, process, export
● Language SDK
● Automatic Instrumentation

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Current Component Status
API SDK Protocol
Tracing Stable Stable Stable
Metrics Stable Mixed Stable
Logging Draft Draft Beta
Baggage Stable* Stable n/a

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MARA: Telemetry (So Far)

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Where We Started
● Application: Bank of Sirius
○ Forked from Google’s Bank of Anthos
○ Configured to use Google CloudTrace
● Overall Challenges
○ Add management/monitoring
● Telemetry Challenges
○ Move away from CloudTrace
○ Determine how to best instrument and collect traces
○ Collect metrics
○ Collect logs

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Considerations
● Avoid Lock In
○ Ability to switch between observability technologies
● Ease of Use
○ Reduction in friction for implementation
○ Automated instrumentation when possible
● Visualization Tooling
○ Ability to use and correlate data to make decisions
● Resource Use
○ How much to dedicate to telemetry?

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Our Observability Wishlist
● Logging
● Tracing
● Metrics
● Health checks
● Runtime state introspection
● Heap/core dumps
● Exception/error aggregation and notification

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Our Observability Options

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The Winner….
● OpenTelemetry solves the bulk of our issues
● However…
○ Some components are not fully stable
○ Not many production examples
○ Overall “newness”
● The Solution….
○ OpenTelemetry tracing / collector
○ Other technologies as a stop-gap
○ Also allows for benchmarking
○ OTEL vs other solutions

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Where We are Today
Tracing
• OTEL Collector
• OTEL SDK in Bank of Sirius
Logging
• Elasticsearch
• Filebeat
• Kibana
Metrics
• Prometheus
• StatsD
• Postgres Prometheus Exporter
Visualization
• Jaeger
• Grafana

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MARA: Telemetry (The Future)

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MARA and OpenTelemetry: The Vision
Integration of
OTEL tracing
into MARA
1
Convert
Metrics to use
OTEL
2
Convert Log
Management
to use OTEL
3
Operationalize
OTEL
4

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Other Areas of Interest
Deploy
OpenTelemetry
Demo Web Store
on MARA
Send OTEL data
to third party
services
Integrate OTEL in
other parts of the
MARA framework

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Community Engagement
● Track and adopt OpenTelemetry enhancements
● Extend OpenTelemetry reach to…
○ Other MARA components
○ Other NGINX projects
● Contribute to OpenTelemetry projects
● Provide feedback on experience
○ Blogs
○ Talks
○ Videos

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Challenges

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Known Challenges
● Maturity of components
○ Some components still in beta
○ Early in life cycle of other components
● Instrumentation type
○ Manual versus Auto instrumentation
● Operational concerns
○ Resource concerns (cpu / mem)
○ Performance impact
○ Long term data storage concerns
● Standards / Best Practices