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Traces

Observability tools aim to show the big picture, no matter if you're monitoring just a few or many components. In a cloud-native microservice architecture, a user request often flows through dozens of different microservices. Logging and monitoring tools help to track the request's path. However, they treat each component or microservice in isolation. This individual treatment results in operational issues.

Distributed tracing charts out the transactions in cloud-native systems, helping you to understand the application behavior and relations between the frontend actions and backend implementation.

The diagram shows how distributed tracing helps to track the request path:

Prerequisites

For a complete recording of a distributed trace, it is essential that every involved component is at least propagating the trace context. In Kyma, all components involved in users' requests support the W3C Trace Context protocol, which is a vendor-neutral protocol getting more and more supported by all kinds of vendors and tools. The involved Kyma components are mainly Istio, Serverless, and Eventing.

With that, your application must also propagate the W3C Trace Context for any user-related activity. This can be achieved easily using the Open Telemetry SDKs available for all common programming languages. If an application follows that guidance and is part of the Istio Service Mesh, it's already outlined with dedicated span data in the trace data collected by the Kyma telemetry setup.

Furthermore, an application should enrich a trace with additional span data and send these data to the cluster-central telemetry services. That can also be achieved with the help of the mentioned Open Telemetry SDKs.

Architecture

The telemetry module provides an in-cluster central deployment of an OTel Collector. The collector exposes endpoints for the OTLP protocol for GRPC and HTTP-based communication using the dedicated telemetry-otlp-traces service, where all Kyma components and users' applications should send the trace data to.

An end-to-end request is triggered and populates across the distributed application. Every involved component is propagating the trace context using the W3C Trace Context protocol.
The involved components which have contributed a new span to the trace send the related span data to the trace collector using the telemetry-otlp-traces service. The communication happens based on the OTLP protocol either using GRPC or HTTP.
The trace collector enriches the span data with relevant metadata, typical for sources running on Kubernetes, like Pod identifiers.
With the TracePipeline resource, the trace collector is configured with a target backend.
The backend can run in-cluster.
The backend can also run out-cluster, having a proper way of authentication in place.
The trace data can be consumed using the backend system.

OTel Collector

The OTel Collector comes with a concept of pipelines consisting of receivers, processors, and exporters with which you can flexibly plug pipelines together. Kyma's TracePipeline provides a hardened setup of an OTel Collector and also abstracts the underlying pipeline concept. The benefits of having that abstraction in place are:

Supportability - all features are tested and supported
Migratability - smooth migration experiences when switching underlying technologies or architectures
Native Kubernetes support - API provided by Kyma allows for an easy integration with Secrets, for example, served by the SAP BTP Operator; The Telemetry Operator takes care of the full lifecycle
Focus - the user doesn't need to understand underlying concepts

The downside is that only a limited set of features is available. Here, you can opt out at any time by bringing your own collector setup. The current feature set focuses on providing the full configurability of backends integrated by OTLP. As a next step, meaningful filter options will be provided. Especially head and tail-based sampling configurations.

Telemetry Operator

The TracePipeline resource is managed by the Telemetry Operator, a typical Kubernetes operator responsible for managing the custom parts of the OTel Collector configuration.

The Telemetry Operator watches all TracePipeline resources and related Secrets. Whenever the configuration changes, it validates the configuration and generates a new configuration for the OTel Collector, where a ConfigMap for the configuration is generated. Furthermore, referenced Secrets are copied into one Secret that is mounted to the Collector as well. Furthermore, the operator manages the full lifecycle of the OTel Collector Deployment itself. With that, it only gets deployed when there is an actual TracePipeline defined. At anytime, you can opt out of using the tracing feature by not specifying a TracePipeline.

Setting up a TracePipeline

In the following steps, you can see how to set up a typical TracePipeline. For an overview of all available attributes, see the reference document.

Step 1. Create a TracePipeline with an output

To ship traces to a new OTLP output, create a resource file of the TracePipeline kind:

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apiVersion: telemetry.kyma-project.io/v1alpha1
kind: TracePipeline
metadata:
  name: jaeger
spec:
  output:
    otlp:
      endpoint:
        value: http://jaeger-collector.jaeger.svc.cluster.local:4317

This configures the underlying OTel Collector with a pipeline for traces. The receiver of the pipeline will be of the OTLP type and be accessible using the telemetry-otlp-traces service. As an exporter, an otlp or an otlphttp exporter is used, dependent on the configured protocol.

To create the instance, apply the resource file in your cluster:
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```
kubectl apply -f path/to/my-trace-pipeline.yaml
```

Check that the status of the TracePipeline in your cluster is Ready:

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kubectl get tracepipeline
NAME              STATUS    AGE
http-backend      Ready     44s

Step 2. Enable Istio tracing

By default, the tracing feature of the Istio module is disabled to avoid increased network utilization in the case of the TracePipeline absence. To activate the Istio tracing feature with a sampling rate of 100% (not recommended on production), use a resource similar to the following:

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apiVersion: telemetry.istio.io/v1alpha1
kind: Telemetry
metadata:
  name: tracing-default
  namespace: istio-system
spec:
  tracing:
  - providers:
    - name: "kyma-traces"
  randomSamplingPercentage: 100.00

Step 3. Switch the protocol to HTTP

To use the HTTP protocol instead of the default GRPC, use the protocol attribute and ensure that the proper port is configured as part of the endpoint. Typically port 4317 is used for GRPC and port 4318 for HTTP.

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apiVersion: telemetry.kyma-project.io/v1alpha1
kind: TracePipeline
metadata:
  name: jaeger
spec:
  output:
    otlp:
      protocol: http
      endpoint:
        value: http://jaeger-collector.jaeger.svc.cluster.local:4318

Step 4: Add authentication details

To integrate with external systems, you must configure authentication details. At the moment, only Basic Authentication is supported. A more general token-based authentication will be supported soon.

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apiVersion: telemetry.kyma-project.io/v1alpha1
kind: TracePipeline
metadata:
  name: jaeger
spec:
  output:
    otlp:
      endpoint:
        value: http://jaeger-collector.jaeger.svc.cluster.local:4317
      authentication:
        basic:
          user:
            value: myUser
          password:
            value: myPwd

Step 5: Add authentication details from Secrets

Integrations into external systems usually require authentication details dealing with sensitive data. To handle that data properly in Secrets, TracePipeline supports the reference of Secrets.

Use the valueFrom attribute to map Secret keys as in the following example:

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apiVersion: telemetry.kyma-project.io/v1alpha1
kind: TracePipeline
metadata:
  name: jaeger
spec:
  output:
    otlp:
      endpoint:
        valueFrom:
            secretKeyRef:
                name: backend
                namespace: default
                key: endpoint
      authentication:
        basic:
          user:
            valueFrom:
              secretKeyRef:
                 name: backend
                 namespace: default
                 key: user
          password:
            valueFrom:
              secretKeyRef:
                 name: backend
                 namespace: default
                 key: password

The related Secret must fulfill the referenced name and Namespace, and contain the mapped key as in the following example:

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kind: Secret
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: backend
  namespace: default
stringData:
  endpoint: https://myhost:4317
  user: myUser
  password: XXX

Step 6: Rotate the Secret

As used in the previous step, a Secret referenced with the secretKeyRef construct can be rotated manually or automatically. For automatic rotation, update the Secret's actual values and keep the Secret's keys stable. TracePipeline watches the referenced Secrets and detects changes, so the Secret rotation takes immediate effect. When using a Secret owned by the SAP BTP Operator, you can configure credentialsRotationPolicy with a specific rotationFrequency to achieve an automated rotation.

Kyma Components with tracing capabilities

Kyma bundles several modules which are potentially involved in user flows. Applications involved in a distributed trace must propagate the trace context to keep the trace complete. Optionally, they can enrich the trace with custom spans which requires reporting them to the backend.

Istio

The Istio module is a crucial enabler in distributed tracing as it provides ingress gateway where usually external requests enter the cluster scope and are enriched with trace context if it hasn't happened yet. Furthermore, every component being part of the Istio Service Mesh is running an Istio proxy, which propagates the context properly but also creates span data. Having Istio tracing activated and doing trace propagation in your application already ensures that you will get a complete picture of a trace, as every component will automatically contribute span data.

The Istio module is configured with an extension provider called kyma-traces. The provider can be activated on the global mesh label using the Istio Telemetry API by placing a resource to the istio-system namespace like that:

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apiVersion: telemetry.istio.io/v1alpha1
kind: Telemetry
metadata:
  name: tracing-default
  namespace: istio-system
spec:
  tracing:
  - providers:
    - name: "kyma-traces"

It configures all Istio proxies with the kyma-traces extension provider, which by default, reports span data to the trace collector of the telemetry module.

Be aware that by default, the sampling rate is configured to 1 percent. That means that only 1 trace out of 100 traces is reported to the trace collector, and all others are dropped. Hereby, the sampling decision itself gets propagated as part of the trace context so that either all involved components are reporting the span data of a trace or none. Increasing the sampling rate results in much higher network utilization in the cluster and also increases the amount of data sent to your tracing backend. Usually, a very low percentage of around 5% is used in a production setup to reduce costs and performance impacts.

To configure an "always-on" sampling, you need to configure a sampling rate of 100% by:

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apiVersion: telemetry.istio.io/v1alpha1
kind: Telemetry
metadata:
  name: tracing-default
  namespace: istio-system
spec:
  tracing:
  - providers:
    - name: "kyma-traces"
    randomSamplingPercentage: 100.00

Namespaces or workloads can selectively be configured with individual settings by placing further resources. To not report spans at all for a specific workload, the disableSpanReporting flag can be activated using the selector expression.

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apiVersion: telemetry.istio.io/v1alpha1
kind: Telemetry
metadata:
  name: tracing-default
  namespace: my-namespace
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      kubernetes.io/name: "my-app"
  tracing:
  - providers:
    - name: "kyma-traces"
    randomSamplingPercentage: 100.00

Eventing

The Kyma Eventing component dispatches events from an in- or out-cluster backend to your workload. Hereby, it is leveraging the cloudevents protocol which natively supports the W3C Trace Context propagation. That said, the Eventing component already propagates trace context properly but does not enrich a trace with more advanced span data.

Serverless

All engines for the Serverless runtime integrate the Open Telemetry SDK by default. With that, trace propagation will no longer be your concern, as the used middlewares are configured to automatically propagate the context for chained calls. By having the Telemetry endpoints configured by default, it also reports custom spans for incoming and outgoing requests. With the provided tooling, more spans can be easily added as part of your Serverless source code.

Limitations

The trace collector setup is designed using the following assumptions:

The collector has no autoscaling options yet and has a limited resource setup of 1 CPU and 1 GiB Memory
Batching is enabled, and a batch will contain up to 512 Spans/batch
An unavailability of a destination must be survived for 5 minutes without direct loss of trace data
An average span consists of 40 attributes with 64 character length

It results in the following limitations:

Throughput

The maximum throughput is 4200 span/sec ~= 15.000.000 spans/hour. If more data needs to be ingested, it can result in a refusal of more data.

Unavailability of output

The destination can be unavailable for up to 5 minutes; a retry for data will be up to 5min, and then data is dropped.

No guaranteed delivery

The used buffers are volatile, and the data can be lost on the otel-collector instance crash.

Single TracePipeline support

Only one TracePipeline resource at a time is supported at the moment.

System span filtering

System-related spans reported by Istio are filtered out without the opt-out option. Here are a few examples of such spans:

/healtz endpoint of a component deployed in the kyma-system Namespace
/metrics endpoint of a component deployed in the kyma-system Namespace
All outgoing spans reported by Grafana and Jaeger
All spans related to Fluent Bit and Loki communication

Frequently Asked Questions

Traces are not arriving at the destination at all

Check the telemetry-trace-collector Pods for error logs by calling kubectl logs -n kyma-system {POD_NAME}
Check the monitoring dashboard for Kyma telemetry if the data gets exported
Verify that you activated Istio tracing

Custom spans are not arriving at the destination, but Istio spans do

Verify that you are using the SDK version for instrumentation that is compatible with the otel-collector version used