Enabling OpenTelemetry-based Distributed Tracing in Event-Driven Systems

When an event is fired into your event mesh, it’s routed by a series of brokers, according to many rules, to different consumers, and in some cases persisted until it’s acknowledged. All that makes it tricky to trace each event from creation to destination(s) so you can answer questions like: “Where are the events going?”, “Are the expected events being published?”, and “Are consumers throwing away events?” OpenTelemetry is the de facto standard for tracing, and supported by all popular observability tools, but only with support baked into your event broker can it give you end-to-end observability of your event-driven system.

Tamimi will explain what it takes to enable distributed tracing of event-driven systems; the drawbacks of implementations in protocols like AMQP, Kafka and MQTT; and the unique approach Solace is taking to solve the problem in a better way.