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Jaeger for distributed tracing with MicroProfile Telemetry

BeginnerGuided Project

Distributed tracing helps DevOps teams to keep track of requests between microservices. MicroProfile Telemetry adopts OpenTelemetry tracing to allow developers to observe requests across their distributed systems. You'll learn how to use MicroProfile Telemetry to adopt OpenTelemetry so your MicroProfile applications can benefit from both manual and automatic traces!

Language

  • English

Topic

  • Open Liberty

Enrollment Count

  • 73

Skills You Will Learn

  • Open Liberty, Java, Jakarta EE, MicroProfile

Offered By

  • IBM

Estimated Effort

  • 20 mins

Platform

  • SkillsNetwork

Last Update

  • May 6, 2025
About this Guided Project
The use of microservices architecture can increase difficulty to see how services depend on or affect other services. Consequently, making it harder to find the source of latency or inaccuracy.

One way to increase observability of an application is by emitting traces. OpenTelemetry is a set of APIs, SDKs, tooling, and integrations that are designed for the creation and management of telemetry data such as traces, metrics, and logs. MicroProfile Telemetry adopts OpenTelemetry so your applications can benefit from both manual and automatic traces.

Traces represent requests and consist of multiple spans. Spans are representative of single operations in a request and contain a name, time-related data, log messages and metadata to give information about what occurs during a transaction.

Context is an immutable object that is contained in the span data to identify the unique request that each span is a part of. This data is required for moving trace information across service boundaries, allowing developers to follow a single request through a potentially complex distributed system. Exporters are components that send data to a backend service so you can visualize and monitor the generated spans.

You’ll configure the provided inventory and system services to use Jaeger for distributed tracing with MicroProfile Telemetry. You’ll run these services in two separate JVMs made of two server instances to demonstrate tracing in a distributed environment. If all the components were run on a single server, then any logging software would be sufficient.

Instructors

Grace Jansen

Developer Advocate

Grace is a Java Champion and Developer Advocate at IBM, working with Open Liberty, MicroProfile and Cloud Technologies. She has been with IBM since graduating from Exeter University with a Degree in Biology. Grace enjoys bringing a varied perspective to her projects and using her knowledge of biological systems to simplify complex software patterns and architectures. As a developer advocate, Grace builds POC’s, demos and sample applications, and writes guides and tutorials. She is a regular presenter at international technology conferences and has authored a book on reactive systems. Grace also has a keen passion for encouraging more women into STEM and especially Technology careers.

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