Unlocking Observability in Kafka-Based Systems with OpenTelemetry

Distributed tracing is essential for tracking requests across microservices. But when it comes to Kafka’s decoupled producers, consumers, and asynchronous processes, tracing a transaction from start to finish isn’t always straightforward.

In this talk, we’ll explore how to monitor Kafka-based applications using distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry. By leveraging tools like Jaeger and New Relic, we’ll uncover how to gain a full view of your microservices, even in the face of Kafka’s asynchronous nature.

Join me for a live demo with a simple Java Spring-Boot app, where we’ll walk through both automatic and manual instrumentation to capture rich telemetry. We’ll also touch on infrastructure-level observability, pulling metrics and traces from Apache Kafka brokers and Apache Flink.

Ready to dive deep into boosting your system’s observability? Let’s make sure you can track and analyze every transaction, no matter how complex!

About the Speaker
Harry Kimpel, Principal Developer Relations Engineer, New Relic.

Passionate software craftsman with 25+ years experience in a broad spectrum of development technologies and platforms. Mostly focusing on .NET/C#, the Microsoft development stack and cloud-native software architectures. Key focus also on Microsoft Azure as well as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Observability, monitoring and securing these environments are key aspects. Currently extremely interested in the Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr).