OpenTracing Support In TIBCO BusinessWorks Container Edition

The past month during the KubeCon 2019 Europe in Barcelona OpenTracing announces its merge with OpenCensus project to create a new standard named OpenTelemetry that is going to be live in September 2019.

OpenTracing, OpenCensus Merge into a Single New Project, OpenTelemetry - The New Stack

Two open source projects that have been instrumental in providing metrics for cloud native operations have merged into a single project. The fusion of Google’s OpenCensus and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s OpenTracing will be known as OpenTelemetry, and will be managed by the CNCF. The idea…

So, I think that would be awesome to take a look at the capabilities regarding OpenTracing we have available in TIBCO BusinessWorks Container Edition

Today’s world is too complex in terms of how our architectures are defined and managed. New concepts in the last years like containers, microservices, service mesh, give us the option to reach a new level of flexibility, performance, and productivity but also comes with a cost of management we need to deal with.

Years ago architectures were simpler, service was a concept that was starting out, but even then a few issues begin to arise regarding monitoring, tracing, logging and so on. So, in those days everything was solved with a Development Framework that all our services were going to include because all of our services were developed by the same team, same technology, and in that framework, we can make sure things were handled properly.

Now, we rely on standards to do this kind of things, and for example, for Tracing, we rely on OpenTracing. I don’t want to spend time talking about what OpenTracing is where they have a full medium account talking themselves much better than I could ever do, so please take some minutes to read about it.

Distributed Tracing in 10 Minutes

With the intrinsic concurrency and asynchrony of modern software applications, distributed tracing has become part of the table stakes for effective monitoring. That said, instrumenting a system for…

The only statement I want to do here is the following one:

Tracing is not Logging, and please be sure you understand that.

Tracing is about sampling, it’s like how flows are performing and if everything is worked but it is not about a specific request has been done well for customer ID whatever… that’s logging, no tracing.

So OpenTracing and its different implementations like Jaeger or Zipkin are the way we can implement tracing today in a really easy way, and this is not something that you could only do in your code-based development language, you can do it with our zero-code tools to develop cloud-native applications like TIBCO BusinessWorks Container Edition and that’s what I’d like to show you today. So, let the match, begin…

First thing I’d like to do is to show you the scenario we’re going to implement, and this is going to be the one shown in the image below:

You are going to have two REST service that is going to call one to each other, and we’re going to export all the traces to Jaeger external component and later we can use its UI to analyze the flow in a graphical and easy way.

So, the first thing we need to do is to develop the services that as you can see in the pictures below are going to be quite easy because this is not the main purpose of our scenario.

Once, we have our docker images based on those applications we can start, but before we launch our applications, we need to launch our Jaeger system you can read all info about how to do it in the link below:

Getting started

Get up and running with Jaeger in your local environment

But at the end we only to run the following command:

docker run -d --name jaeger -e COLLECTOR_ZIPKIN_HTTP_PORT=9411  -p 5775:5775/udp  -p 6831:6831/udp  -p 6832:6832/udp  -p 5778:5778  -p 16686:16686  -p 14268:14268  -p 9411:9411  jaegertracing/all-in-one:1.8

And now, we’re ready to launch our applications and the only things we need to do in our developments because as you could see we didn’t do anything strange in our development and it was quite straightforward is to add the following environment variables when we launch our container

BW_JAVA_OPTS=”-Dbw.engine.opentracing.enable=true” -e JAEGER_AGENT_HOST=jaeger -e JAEGER_AGENT_PORT=6831 -e JAEGER_SAMPLER_MANAGER_HOST_PORT=jaeger:5778

And… that’s it, we launch our containers with the following commands and wait until applications are up & running

docker run -ti -p 5000:5000 — name provider -e BW_PROFILE=Docker -e PROVIDER_PORT=5000 -e BW_LOGLEVEL=ERROR — link jaeger -e BW_JAVA_OPTS=”-Dbw.engine.opentracing.enable=true” -e JAEGER_AGENT_HOST=jaeger -e JAEGER_AGENT_PORT=6831 -e JAEGER_SAMPLER_MANAGER_HOST_PORT=jaeger:5778 provider:1.0

docker run — name consumer -ti -p 6000:6000 -e BW_PROFILE=Docker — link jaeger — link provider -e BW_JAVA_OPTS=”-Dbw.engine.opentracing.enable=true” -e JAEGER_AGENT_HOST=jaeger -e JAEGER_AGENT_PORT=6831 -e JAEGER_SAMPLER_MANAGER_HOST_PORT=jaeger:5778 -e CONSUMER_PORT=6000 -e PROVIDER_HOST=provider consumer:1.0

Once they’re running, let’s generate some requests! To do that I’m going to use a SOAPUI project to generate some stable load for 60 secs, as you can see in the image below:

And now we’re going to go to the following URL to see the Jaeger UI and we can see the following thing as soon as you click in the Search button

And then if we zoom in some specific trace:

That’s pretty amazing but that’s not all, because you can see if you search in the UI about the data of this traces, you can see technical data from your BusinessWorks Container Edition flows as you can see in the picture below:

But… what if you want to add your custom tags to those traces? You can do it as well!! Let me explain to you how.

Since BusinessWorks Container Edition 2.4.4 you are going to find a new tab in all your activities named “Tags” where you can add the custom tags that you want this activity to include, for example, a custom id that is going to be propagated through the whole process we can define it as you can see here.