In the modern SAP landscape, SAP Kyma offers a cloud-native extension framework built on Kubernetes, enabling seamless integration and extension of SAP solutions with microservices, serverless functions, and event-driven architectures. As these distributed systems grow in complexity, understanding the flow of requests across multiple services becomes challenging.
Distributed tracing is a critical observability technique that helps track and visualize how requests propagate through different components. SAP Kyma leverages Jaeger, a powerful open-source distributed tracing system, to provide end-to-end visibility into microservice interactions. This article explores how distributed tracing with Jaeger works in Kyma, its benefits, and best practices for SAP professionals.
Distributed tracing collects data about requests as they travel through various microservices in a distributed system. It captures timing, dependencies, and error information, helping developers and operators to:
- Identify performance bottlenecks.
- Trace root causes of failures.
- Analyze request flows across services.
- Improve system reliability and user experience.
Jaeger, originally developed by Uber, has become a CNCF graduated project and a standard in distributed tracing. SAP Kyma integrates Jaeger as part of its observability stack, offering:
- Automatic instrumentation: Many Kyma components and services are pre-instrumented to emit trace data.
- Context propagation: Trace context travels through HTTP calls, messaging, and event-driven communication.
- Visual trace analysis: Jaeger UI lets users visualize spans, service dependencies, and timing details.
- Integration with Prometheus and Grafana: Enables comprehensive monitoring and troubleshooting.
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Trace Generation:
- When a request enters the Kyma environment (e.g., API call, event trigger), it is assigned a unique trace ID.
- As the request flows through multiple microservices or serverless functions, each segment (span) is recorded.
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Span Collection:
- Spans capture start time, duration, tags (metadata), and logs.
- Tracing SDKs and middleware integrated in Kyma services send spans to Jaeger agents.
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Data Aggregation:
- Jaeger agents forward collected spans to Jaeger collectors.
- Data is stored in a backend (e.g., Elasticsearch or Cassandra).
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Visualization and Analysis:
- Users access the Jaeger UI to search for traces by trace ID, operation name, or time window.
- The UI shows detailed timing, errors, and causal relationships between services.
¶ Setting Up and Using Jaeger in Kyma
Kyma comes with Jaeger pre-installed in its monitoring namespace and enabled by default for system components. To use Jaeger tracing for your own custom services in Kyma:
- Integrate Jaeger client libraries (OpenTelemetry or Jaeger SDKs) in your microservices or functions.
- Instrument your code to create and propagate trace contexts across service calls.
- Deploy your containerized services or serverless functions to Kyma.
- Kyma’s Istio service mesh automatically propagates trace headers across HTTP requests.
- Use the Kyma Console or port-forward the Jaeger service in the monitoring namespace.
- Search for traces by operation name or time to analyze request flows.
- Enhanced Visibility: Understand the end-to-end path of user requests across SAP Kyma services.
- Performance Optimization: Pinpoint slow services or inefficient calls that degrade user experience.
- Faster Troubleshooting: Quickly identify and resolve failures, errors, or unexpected delays.
- Improved Reliability: Detect cascading failures and service dependencies that impact availability.
- Compliance and Auditing: Trace user interactions for auditing in complex SAP integrations.
- Standardize Instrumentation: Use OpenTelemetry or Jaeger SDKs consistently across all services.
- Propagate Trace Context: Ensure trace IDs travel through HTTP headers, messaging queues, and event buses.
- Tag Spans with Business Context: Add meaningful metadata such as tenant IDs, user IDs, or transaction types.
- Correlate Logs and Metrics: Combine traces with logs (via Fluent Bit/Elasticsearch) and metrics (via Prometheus) for full observability.
- Manage Sampling: Adjust trace sampling rates to balance data volume and observability needs.
Distributed tracing with Jaeger is a powerful observability tool in SAP Kyma that brings transparency to complex, distributed SAP extension landscapes. By enabling deep insights into service interactions, performance, and failures, Jaeger helps SAP teams build more resilient and efficient cloud-native applications.
Embracing distributed tracing in Kyma not only enhances operational excellence but also accelerates innovation and continuous improvement in SAP ecosystems.