Interoperability From Kieker to OpenTelemetry: Demonstrated as Export to ExplorViz

TL;DR

This work describes how to export Kieker distributed tracing data to OpenTelemetry using the pipe-and-filter framework TeeTime and demonstrates the usability of this approach by visualizing trace data of TeaStore in the ExplorViz visualization tool.

Abstract

While the observability framework Kieker has a low overhead for tracing, its results currently cannot be used in most analysis tools due to lack of interoperability of the data formats. The OpenTelemetry standard aims for standardizing observability data. In this work, we describe how to export Kieker distributed tracing data to OpenTelemetry. This is done using the pipe-and-filter framework TeeTime. For TeeTime, a stage was defined that uses Kieker execution data, which can be created from most record types. We demonstrate the usability of our approach by visualizing trace data of TeaStore in the ExplorViz visualization tool.

Figures (2)

• Figure 1: Process of Exporting Kieker Traces with TeeTime Stages to ExplorViz
• Figure 2: TeaStore as visualized by ExplorViz