OpenTracing has become a standardized way to write distributed tracing within the microservices architecture. It has been adopted by many libraries in all kinds of programming languages. I was missing a library in .NET for creating distributed traces between Kafka clients, so I decided to write one!
OpenTracing.Confluent.Kafka
OpenTracing.Confluent.Kafka is a library build in .NET Standard 1.3. With the help of some extension methods and decorators for the Confluent.Kafka consumer and producer it makes distributed tracing between the producer and the consumer quite simple.
Example
There is a simple console app that serves as an example on how to use the decorators to create a trace with two spans, one for the producing side and one for the consuming side. It’s build in .NET Core, so you can run it where ever you like. It integrates with Kafka and Jaeger, so in order to setup these systems I have provided a simple script and some Docker and Kubernetes yaml files for a one-click-setup. If you don’t run under Windows, you need to setup everything manually. The script should be able to act as an indication of what needs to be done.
The result when running the app should look something like the image below.
Happy tracing!
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