Interoperability From Kieker to OpenTelemetry: Demonstrated as Export to ExplorViz

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to export Kieker tracing data to OpenTelemetry format using TeeTime, enabling interoperability and visualization in ExplorViz, thus bridging the gap between low-overhead tracing and analysis tools.

Contribution

It introduces a novel export pipeline from Kieker to OpenTelemetry using TeeTime, facilitating interoperability of distributed tracing data.

Findings

Successful export of Kieker data to OpenTelemetry format

Visualization of trace data in ExplorViz demonstrates usability

Enhanced interoperability between tracing frameworks

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.