Our software is more complex than ever: applications must be reliable, predictable, and easy to use to meet modern expectations. As developers, this means our responsibilities have grown while the things we can control have stayed the same. In order to better understand our systems and create truly modern software, we need observability. This workshop will walk through what observability means for Java developers and how to achieve it in our systems with the least amount of work using the open source observability project OpenTelemetry.

1. Observability in Java:
Getting Started with
OpenTelemetry
Katy Farmer, Developer Advocate & Ted Young, Director of Open Source Development
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2. 2
Hi! I’m Katy.
Katy Farmer
Developer Relations Manager

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Hi! I’m Ted.
Ted Young
Director of Open Source Development

4. Yes
No
No but considering it
Poll:
Do you currently use
distributed tracing?

5. What Is
Observability?
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● the ability to navigate from effect to cause
Observability (n)
For example…
Spike in errors → misconfiguration
Increased latency → new customer behavior
User complaints → upstream service deployed

8. 8
How Did We
Get Here?
What Changed For Developers?

9. 9
What Changed?

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SCALE!

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SCALE!

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What is a
Deep System?
e.g., mobile, react, client APis
e.g., ingress controller
e.g., custom microservices
e.g., managed services
like DynamoDB
Independently
Managed
Layers

13. Too many tools and tool training
Service dependency visibility
Performance incidents
Deployments
Poll:
What is your biggest pain point
for monitoring performance?

14. 14
Say hi to OpenTelemetry
OpenTelemetry provides a single set
of APIs, libraries, agents, and collector
services to capture distributed traces
and metrics from your application.
https://opentelemetry.io/

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Context Propagation
Follow the transaction
● At scale, it is impossible to find the
relevant data. Too much noise.
● To investigate an issue, events and
metrics must first be contextualized.
○ Grouped by transaction
○ Grouped by resource
○ Grounded by product attributes
● Adding this context is a lot of work!
● OpenTelemetry does it for you.
Single Transaction

16. Context propagation is fundamental!
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17. Java Setup
Docs here!
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Requirements
● Java 7+
Steps
● Install OpenTelemetry
● Install Instrumentation Adapters
● Configure the SDK
● Decorate your application code
Java Setup

19. java -javaagent:path/to/opentelemetry-auto-0.2.0.jar
-Dota.exporter.jar=path/to/opentelemetry-auto-exporters-otlp-0.2.0.jar
-Dota.exporter.otlp.endpoint=localhost:55678
-jar myapp.jar
Java Auto Installation
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README: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-auto-instr-java

20. Library Adapters
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● gRPC
● Hibernate
● HttpURLConnection
● Hystrix
● java.util.logging
● JAX-RS
● JDBC
● Jedis
● Jetty
● JMS
● JSP
● Kafka
● Lettuce
● Akka HTTP
● Apache HttpAsyncClient
● Apache HttpClient
● AWS SDK
● Cassandra Driver
● Couchbase Client
● Dropwizard Views
● Elasticsearch API
● Elasticsearch REST Client
● Finatra
● Geode Client
● Google HTTP Client
● Grizzly
● Log4j
● Logback
● MongoDB Drivers
● Netty
● OkHttp
● Play
● Play WS
● Project Reactor
● RabbitMQ Client
● Ratpack
● RMI
● RxJava
● Servlet
● Spark Web Framework
● Spring Data
● Spring Scheduling
● Spring Servlet MVC
● Spring Webflux
● Spymemcached
● Twilio
Find out what’s currently available by checking the registry: https://opentelemetry.io/registry/

21. Warning! Lightstep does not use sampling. Leave OpenTelemetry sampling
disabled.
SDK Configuration
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Propagator Options
● W3C
● B3
● Lightstep (deprecated)
Exporter Options
● Lightstep
● OTLP
● Jaeger
● Console (debug)

22. Span span =
tracer.spanBuilder("/resource/path").setSpanKind(Span.Kind.CLIENT).startSpan();
span.setAttribute("http.method", "GET");
span.setAttribute("http.url", url.toString());
Map<String, AttributeValue> eventAttributes = new HashMap<>();
eventAttributes.put("key", AttributeValue.stringAttributeValue("value"));
eventAttributes.put("result", AttributeValue.longAttributeValue(0L));
span.addEvent("Event Name", eventAttributes);
Application Code
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Further instrument your application code using the OpenTelemetry APIs: https://github.com/open-
telemetry/opentelemetry-java/blob/master/QUICKSTART.md

23. Exploring Trace Data
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24. The right
observability solution
● Easily be able to see and understand
your highly distributed environment
● Immediately pinpoint performance
regression
● Enable developers to ship with
confidence
● Enable easy sharing of information
● Keep context
● Won’t miss an insight
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25. LightStep:
Observability
with context
● Automatic deployment and
regression detection
● System and service diagrams
● Real-time and historical root cause
analysis
● Correlations
● Custom alerting
● Easy Setup with no vendor lock-in
● No cardinality limitations, really
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26. Get Started Today
lightstep.com/play
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