Tracing

Pitaya supports tracing using OpenTelemetry.

Using OpenTelemetry tracing

Pitaya supports tracing using OpenTelemetry. To enable and configure OpenTelemetry tracing, you can use standard OpenTelemetry environment variables.

First, make sure to call the InitializeOtel function in your main application:

func main() {
    // ...
    err := tracing.InitializeOtel()
    if err != nil {
        logger.Log.Errorf("Failed to initialize OpenTelemetry: %v", err)
    }
    // ...
}

Configuration Options

OpenTelemetry can be configured using standard environment variables. Here are some key variables you might want to set:

OTEL_SERVICE_NAME: The name of your service.
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT: The endpoint of your OpenTelemetry collector.
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL: The protocol to use (e.g., grpc or http/protobuf).
OTEL_TRACES_SAMPLER: The sampling strategy to use.
OTEL_TRACES_SAMPLER_ARG: The argument for the sampling strategy.
OTEL_SDK_DISABLED: Set to true to disable tracing.

For a complete list of OpenTelemetry environment variables, refer to the OpenTelemetry specification.

Testing Locally

To test OpenTelemetry tracing locally, you can use Jaeger as your tracing backend. First, start Jaeger using Docker:

make run-jaeger-aio
make run-cluster-example-frontend-tracing
make run-cluster-example-backend-tracing

The last two commands will run your Pitaya servers with OpenTelemetry configured with the following envs:

OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=example-frontend OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:4317 OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL=grpc OTEL_TRACES_SAMPLER=parentbased_traceidratio OTEL_TRACES_SAMPLER_ARG="1"

OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=example-backend OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:4317 OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL=grpc OTEL_TRACES_SAMPLER=parentbased_traceidratio OTEL_TRACES_SAMPLER_ARG="1"

Access the Jaeger UI at http://localhost:16686 to view and analyze your traces.