Tracing event-based systems with OpenTelemetry

Ideally, you should be using distributed tracing to trace requests through your system, but event-based systems such as Kafka decouple producers and consumers, which means there are no direct transactions to trace between them. Event-based architectures also use asynchronous processes, which have implicit, not explicit, dependencies. That makes it challenging to understand how your microservices are working together.

However, it is possible to monitor your event-based systems with distributed tracing and OpenTelemetry. You can then analyze and visualize your traces in open source distributed tracing tools or full observability platforms like New Relic. In this talk I will leverage a simple application to show how you can achieve this in various different configuration options.