IBM's Instana application resource monitoring (ARM) tool leverages automation and artificial intelligence to deliver the visibility and actionable information DevOps teams need to manage dynamic applications. Instana can start monitoring a platform in a few seconds as soon as the agent for the target platform is deployed and voilà... that's it.
But what if a customer has already built several microservices applications, which are deployed on top of non-observed infrastructures by Instana and are already generating OpenTelemetry spans?
OpenTelemetry is a collection of APIs, SDKs, and tools. Use it to instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces) to help you analyze your software’s performance and behavior.
This is something that was asked by a customer who just wanted to know whether this is feasible or not. To try and prove this to the customer I went to the official documentation and tried to try out with example in Go programming language.
Instana can seamlessly integrate with OpenTelemetry and can also enhance the data from OpenTelemetry. This integration further enhances data acquisition capabilities.
The official documentation is here: OpenTelemetry Integration for Go Application which also points to a public GitHub repository.
Obviously, the first thing to do is to clone the repository.
git clone https://github.com/instana/go-otel-exporter.git
I had an old version of Go on my laptop, I updated it to Go 20 in order to make this work.
Once in the folder where the code is cloned to the following (as mentioned on the GitHub page)
go get github.com/instana/go-otel-exporter
With the cloned repository, the main.go app is in the examples subfolder. Depending on how you want to work it, you might need to create the following go.work file.
// go.work
go 1.20
use ./example
The provided main.go file as provided on the GitHub repo is the following;
package main
import (
"context"
"time"
instana "github.com/instana/go-otel-exporter"
"go.opentelemetry.io/otel"
sdktrace "go.opentelemetry.io/otel/sdk/trace"
"go.opentelemetry.io/otel/trace"
)
// This example application demonstrates how to use the Instana OTel Exporter.
// Make sure to provide the required environment variables before run the application:
// * INSTANA_ENDPOINT_URL
// * INSTANA_AGENT_KEY
func main() {
ch := make(chan bool)
// Acquire an instance of the Instana OTel Exporter
exporter := instana.New()
// Setup and bootstrap the tracer provider
tracerProvider := sdktrace.NewTracerProvider(
sdktrace.WithBatcher(exporter),
)
otel.SetTracerProvider(tracerProvider)
ctx := context.Background()
// Instrument something with OTel
tracer := otel.Tracer("my-traced-tech")
_, span := tracer.Start(ctx, "my_span", trace.WithSpanKind(trace.SpanKindServer))
// This simulates the time that a span takes to be completed
time.Sleep(time.Millisecond * 400)
span.End()
<-ch
}
Required elements to enable tracing in Instana
The elements which are required to make all this work are;
the INSTANA_AGENT_KEY which could be retrieved from the Instana instance/tenant you want to work with. Follow this link to find the information: Preparing endpoints and keys.
the INSTANA_ENDPOINT_URL: follow this link to find the information: Preparing endpoints and keys.
you would surely like to have a service name INSTANA_SERVICE_NAME
last but not least, you should have spans in various parts of your application so that it could be traced precisel
Spans **represent the timing of code executions; in other words, an action with a start and end time. It also contains a set of data that consists of both a timestamp and a duration.**
As I wanted a real "quick and dirty" version, I made some changes and made what follows;
package main
import (
"context"
"fmt"
"os"
"time"
instana "github.com/instana/go-otel-exporter"
"go.opentelemetry.io/otel"
sdktrace "go.opentelemetry.io/otel/sdk/trace"
"go.opentelemetry.io/otel/trace"
)
// This example application demonstrates how to use the Instana OTel Exporter.
// Make sure to provide the required environment variables before run the application:
// * INSTANA_ENDPOINT_URL
// * INSTANA_AGENT_KEY
// You can also use the INSTANA_LOG_LEVEL environment variable to set the log level. Available options are:
// * debug
// * info
// * warn
// * error
func main() {
os.Setenv("INSTANA_AGENT_KEY", "XXXXXXXX ---- MY INSTANA SERVER AGENT KEY ------")
os.Setenv("INSTANA_ENDPOINT_URL", "https://serverless-orange-saas.instana.io")
os.Setenv("INSTANA_SERVICE_NAME", "AAM-SERVICE")
fmt.Println("INSTANA_AGENT_KEY:", os.Getenv("INSTANA_AGENT_KEY"))
fmt.Println("INSTANA_ENDPOINT_URL:", os.Getenv("INSTANA_ENDPOINT_URL"))
fmt.Println("INSTANA_SERVICE_NAME:", os.Getenv("INSTANA_SERVICE_NAME"))
//ch := make(chan struct{})
// Acquire an instance of the Instana OTel Exporter
exporter := instana.New()
// Setup and bootstrap the tracer provider
tracerProvider := sdktrace.NewTracerProvider(
sdktrace.WithBatcher(exporter),
)
otel.SetTracerProvider(tracerProvider)
ctx := context.Background()
// Instrument something with OTel
tracer := otel.Tracer("AAM-my-traced-tech")
_, span := tracer.Start(ctx, "my_span", trace.WithSpanKind(trace.SpanKindServer))
time.Sleep(time.Millisecond * 400)
span.End()
for i := 0; i < 300; i++ {
time.Sleep(time.Millisecond * 500)
fmt.Println("i:", i)
}
}
Once you've executed your application, go to the Instana dashboard and make a search filter for your service.
This example is more than basic. It just shows that application code written in any language which sends tracing metrics to OpenTelemetry could be easily modified to work with Instana.
My next step is to do the same sample showcase with Python.
Thanks for reading and stay tuned!
Links
Concepts of Tracing: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/instana-observability/current?topic=monitoring-traces
Monitoring Go: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/instana-observability/current?topic=technologies-monitoring-go#tracing
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