Telemetry and Monitoring

Document updated on Mar 8, 2024

KrakenD’s no lock-in philosophy emphasizes flexibility and interoperability, ensuring technology-specific dependencies don’t constrain you. Giving you choices for observability and networking tools is key to success in a distributed microservices architecture.

Our OpenTelemetry integration and its previous predecessors OpenCensus, and the Metrics API, are part of this effort. Our components provide:

• Ways to export data to detect root causes of problems.
• Monitoring and details of the different distributed transactions.
• Performance and latency optimization in the systems of your choice.
• The flexibility to use the monitoring system that you have chosen, and not one that you are locked-in

OpenTelemetry presents a unified, open-source framework for collecting and managing telemetry data across distributed systems, such as traces and metrics. It offers vendor neutrality, simplifies instrumentation, and avoids lock-in with specific monitoring platforms. You can choose between over twenty different providers. Add OTEL to your configuration.

OpenCensus is the previous component which has provided reliable service for over six years for traces and metrics, and now its development is frozen in favour of OpenTelemetry. You can still use OpenCensus telemetry, although we recommend you to plan a transition to OpenTelemetry.

The Metrics API and its native exporter to InfluxDB are in a similar situation. It was our richest exporter of metrics data until the OpenTelemetry release, and while it still works, its development has also frozen. See the Metrics API

If starting with a new project, choose an OpenTelemetry integration for metrics and traces.

OpenTelemetry integrations

As OpenTelemetry is an open standard, any provider adopting it using the wire protocol will automatically be compatible with KrakenD. More than 50 vendors natively support it.

So the question of does KrakenD support provider X? can be answered with another question: Does your provider offer an OpenTelemetry integration?.

As providers and software makers make an ongoing effort to adopt OpenTelemetry, you can find an extensive list of systems, SaaS or on-premise, that are on this path, and more are coming (see vendors who natively support OpenTelemetry).

If you work with KrakenD and a piece of software that is not in the list below, please add it!

Self-hosted systems using OTEL

When you want to have complete control of your metrics and traces, this is a list of software you can install in your infrastructure:

• Prometheus: An open-source system monitoring and alerting toolkit.
• Jaeger: An open-source, self-hosted solution for distributed tracing.
• Elastic APM: Part of the Elastic Stack, can be self-hosted for full control over data and infrastructure.
• Grafana Tempo: Integrates with Grafana can be self-hosted for tracing data.

SaaS systems using OTEL

If you want to use a third-party SaaS, here is a list of a few APM systems that vary in their specific offerings, such as AI capabilities, ease of integration, visualization tools, and support for different programming languages and frameworks:

• New Relic: Offers comprehensive monitoring with native support for OpenTelemetry.
• Datadog: Provides extensive analytics and monitoring, supporting OpenTelemetry protocols.
• Dynatrace: Known for AI-powered analytics and robust OpenTelemetry integration.
• Splunk APM (formerly SignalFx): Offers real-time analytics and visualization compatible with OpenTelemetry.
• AppDynamics (Cisco): Supports OpenTelemetry, providing performance analysis and proactive alerting.
• Elastic APM: Part of the Elastic Stack integrates well with OpenTelemetry.
• Instana: Offers automated APM for microservices with OpenTelemetry support.
• Google Cloud’s operations suite (formerly Stackdriver): Provides an integrated suite for monitoring, logging, and diagnostics, compatible with OpenTelemetry.
• AWS X-Ray: Supports OpenTelemetry for applications running in AWS environments.
• Azure Monitor: Fully compatible with OpenTelemetry for monitoring applications on Azure.
• Jaeger: An open-source platform for distributed tracing that supports OpenTelemetry.
• Lightstep: Delivers detailed insights and is compatible with the OpenTelemetry protocol.
• Honeycomb.io: Emphasizes understanding production systems and supports OpenTelemetry.
• Sumo Logic: Offers cloud-native solutions with OpenTelemetry integration.
• SolarWinds AppOptics: Combines APM features with cloud monitoring, supporting OpenTelemetry.
• LogicMonitor: Known for its automated monitoring solutions that are compatible with OpenTelemetry.
• Scout APM: A developer-centric monitoring tool that supports OpenTelemetry.
• Rollbar: Focuses on real-time error tracking and debugging with OpenTelemetry support.
• Wavefront by VMware: A streaming analytics platform integrating with OpenTelemetry.

The adoption of OpenTelemetry by these platforms indicates a strong industry shift towards standardized, open-source observability solutions. You should test the ones you need on KrakenD and ensure they deliver what you seek; from KrakenD, we are unfamiliar with every vendor out there.