Workshop: Analyzing and Visualizing OpenTelemetry Traces with SQL - John Pruitt, Timescale
Channel: CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]
Date: 12/07/2022

Workshop: Analyzing and Visualizing OpenTelemetry Traces with SQL - John Pruitt, Timescale

Speakers: John Pruitt
If you are planning to attend the workshop, follow these instructions:

    Bring your laptop and charger. This will be hands-on!
    Make sure you have Docker installed. You will need it to run de demo.
    The day before, go to tsdb.co/opentelemetry-demo and follow the instructions in the repo to deploy the demo environment we'll be using. This is a lightweight microservices demo that can be installed quickly. You will also have the chance to deploy it at the beginning of the workshop.

We also recommend that you have psql installed (the PostgreSQL client), but this is not absolutely necessary.
All these instructions are also included in the workshop.md file of the tsdb.co/opentelemetry-demo.

Workshop Description:
Of the three observability data types supported by OpenTelemetry (metrics, logs, and traces), the latter presents the most potential. Tracing exposes the inner-workings of requests processing in modern, cloud-native architectures.

Tools typically visualize a single trace, showing how an individual request traversed your entire system. This approach helps with distributed debugging and analysis. However, looking at a single trace is of limited value.

But what if you stored tracing data in a SQL database? You could ask global questions about your system and uncover answers aggregated from thousands of traces at once. You could discover in real-time upstream and downstream dependencies between services or components. You could find slow execution paths, where the error rate spiked since the last deployment, or where the request rate suddenly dropped - and not just that it occurred but pinpoint the cause. Thus, tracing analysis is a proactive tool to help you spot issues before your customers do. In this workshop, you will learn how to do precisely that. Concretely, we will ingest OpenTelemetry traces into a PostgreSQL database, and we’ll learn how to build powerful custom dashboards in Grafana using SQL that will immediately give you a deep level of insight into your distributed systems, helping you make the most out of your tracing data.

First, we will explore a lightweight open-source system designed to demonstrate the power of tracing and SQL that anyone can easily download and run. Then, we will use this demo environment to explore how to search and visualize traces using Jageer and Grafana, and as the last step, we will learn how to create a new Grafana dashboard to visualize throughput, response time and a recursive query for analyzing downstream dependencies through tracing data.