👨‍🚀 Tracetest Monthly Newsletter - November 2023

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Hello, Tracetest Community! 👋

We are thrilled to share the latest updates and exciting news from the Tracetest community! Take a look at what's happened in the last month. 👇

Hot tip of the day!

Parent-child Relation and :First Filtering

There are times when a span you want to select appears several times in a trace, but you want to test a specific instance of it. To select the particular span, you can specify its parent or its position. For example, when trying to test the FeatureFlagService GetFlag operation, we see it matches 3 spans, but we want to apply an assertion against the one called by the get_product_list operation:

Using the information from the selectors docs, we can see how to select the first span that is a child of the ‘get_product_list’.

You can then create add assertions that apply to the specific span, verifying the value retrieved from the feature flag service by get_product_list is correct.

What's New with Tracetest 🎉

Tracetest Core v0.14.7 has been released: This update includes a brand new, lovely, test creation flow, skip trace capability, and more. Lots and lots of new capability released... we will cover the highlights below.

New! ‘skip trace’ allows black box tests! You can now run Tracetest on code bases you have not instrumented… yet. Run a black box test, instrument with OpenTelemetry, and then upgrade to a full end to end test.

Try our demos! We made it easy to try Tracetest, as well as play around with its features to learn more about our OpenTelemetry solution. We have added the OpenTelemetry Community Demo, an Astronomy Store, and our own Pokeshop API demo. Check out the docs and use the ‘join’ links for each demo to immediately run and create tests.

Invite Links. Aren’t these links to join the tracetest-demo organization and be registered as an engineer for the demo environments cool? Creating these magic invite links is part of the product now! Slack an invite to allow people to join a particular Org / environment with a particular role.

Run Agent on the Cloud (BETA). A Tracetest customer asked if they could use app.tracetest.io without running an agent locally? They have a large function as a service (FaaS) based system with lots of complexity, and want to use Tracetest to build tests. They have public endpoints, and wanted to send the trace data to tracetest.io via the OTel collector, having Tracetest run the agent. It is now in Beta!

Integrations 🤝

• New Github Action! Making it easy to connect to Tracetest.io from Github Action Workflows. Try it!
• Test Kafka Based Architectures! Our own Daniel Dias created an example and wrote a technical blog post documenting how to test event-driven systems with OpenTelemetry.

From the Community 🎙️

• Tracetest was at KubeCon NA! Jorge and I attended OTel Day on Monday and talked to people at the Tracetest booth Tuesday through Thursday. 100+ great conversations with current and future users.

• Didn’t Make it to Kubecon? Read about what we saw in our ‘Observability at KubeCon’ article.

• KCD Austria Talk. Adnan Radic’s conference talk, Distributed tracing is awesome, testing is not… until now, has been published on Youtube. Watch it!
• Tracetest is part of the OTel Demo CI/CD Pipeline! Austin Parker, one of the co-founders and maintainers of OpenTelemetry, just added Tracetest tests to the CI/CD process for the official OTel Demo. Our team wrote these tests earlier this summer to help maintain quality of this important Open Source project, but they were run manually… until now! It is now automated as part of the build system.

• Contribute to the OpenTelemetry Community Demo! Our very own Adnan Rahic contributed to the OTel Demo, then wrote an article teaching others how. Read: The Power of Traces: Learn by Contributing to OpenTelemetry.

Like what we do?

Do you have a specific use case you would like us to cover? Do you want to contribute to Tracetest?

At Tracetest, we welcome all contributions!

Not sure where to start? You can:

• Visit our Community Page.
• Check out our contributing guidelines here.
• Book a meeting with us or chat with our team on Discord.

Thank you for being a part of the Tracetest community! We are committed to providing the necessary tools, knowledge, and resources to succeed in the field of tracing and testing. Let’s stay in touch and continue exploring. Stay tuned for more exciting updates in the coming months.

Super long recap, but we got a ton done in November! See you next month!

p.s. Adnan is out this week, but he has a great reason! Congratulations Adnan!!