As enterprises build complex, distributed cloud-native applications using SAP Kyma, monitoring and troubleshooting become critical challenges. Applications composed of multiple microservices and serverless functions communicate across a service mesh, creating intricate call chains that can be difficult to analyze.
To tackle these challenges, SAP Kyma leverages Istio service mesh capabilities for advanced distributed tracing and logging, enabling developers and operators to gain deep visibility into system behavior, performance bottlenecks, and failures.
This article explores how Kyma’s service mesh facilitates distributed tracing and logging, helping ensure reliable, performant, and observable SAP cloud-native applications.
Distributed tracing captures the path of requests as they travel through multiple services in a microservice architecture. Each service generates spans—timed records of individual operations—that collectively form a trace.
In Kyma, distributed tracing helps:
Logging collects detailed event and error information from applications and infrastructure components. Centralized logging aggregates logs from all microservices, functions, and platform layers, making it easier to search, analyze, and correlate events.
Kyma uses Istio, a popular open-source service mesh, which transparently manages service-to-service communication and adds observability features including:
Trace Context Propagation
Istio sidecars propagate trace context headers (e.g., x-request-id, traceparent) with every request, enabling correlation of spans across services.
Span Generation
Each service records spans with metadata such as operation name, timestamps, status, and error information.
Data Collection and Storage
Spans are sent to tracing backends like Jaeger, which Kyma integrates for visual trace analysis.
Visualization
Developers use Jaeger’s UI to view traces, analyze latency breakdowns, and pinpoint problematic services.
Kyma aggregates logs via Fluent Bit and stores them in ElasticSearch, accessible through Kibana dashboards. Logs include:
Centralized logging facilitates searching logs by criteria such as request ID, error codes, timestamps, and service names.
Distributed tracing and logging, powered by Kyma’s Istio service mesh integration, provide essential visibility into the behavior of SAP cloud-native applications. These observability tools enable developers and operators to understand complex service interactions, diagnose issues efficiently, and optimize performance, ensuring that SAP Kyma extensions and microservices run smoothly and reliably.
Leveraging Kyma’s built-in tracing and logging capabilities is key to mastering the operational complexities of modern SAP cloud environments.