Summary

Tracing is process of capturing and recording information about the execution of a software program. This recorded information is called trace - used in development and post-release cycles for debugging. Distributed tracing allows to profile, monitor and debug distributed applications, typically built using a microservices architecture.

Zabbix is built around metrics and currently not so well suited to work with debug/profile information (like traces, logs, etc). Support of trace collection and analysis is requested by our community to increase Zabbix observability capabilities: application level debugging/profiling/ & analysis (incl. incident analysis). Trace correlation with infrastructure metrics would be great improvement to provide more sophisticated problem detection and resolution methods in the future.

There are a lot of tools/frameworks which facilitate tracing/distributed tracing, one of them is OpenTelemetry (OT). OT is observability framework and toolkit designed to facilitate the generation/export/collection of telemetry data such as traces, metrics, and logs.

Pre-requisites:

• https://support.zabbix.com/browse/ZBXNEXT-10069
• https://support.zabbix.com/browse/ZBXNEXT-850
• ability to ingest OT data

Use case

1. As a user I want to view traces in a time ordered table with possibility to open each trace breakdown (in a new widget)

Task

Create widget that is capable to display list of traces for further breakdown/analysis