Kong Konnect Observability and Advanced Analytics with Dynatrace

Understanding and monitoring the performance and health of applications and systems is critical. This is where observability comes into play.

Observability is about gaining a comprehensive understanding of a system's internal state by analyzing the data it generates within the context of real-time events and actions across the infrastructure. Unlike traditional monitoring, which might only tell you when something has gone wrong, observability equips you with the tools and insights needed to discern not just the occurrence of an issue but its underlying causes. This enables teams to proactively manage and optimize their systems rather than merely reacting to failures.

To achieve this, observability relies on three primary pillars:

• Logs provide detailed, timestamped records of events and activities within a system, offering a granular view of operations.
• Metrics deliver quantitative data points that reflect various aspects of system performance, such as resource utilization, response times, and throughput.
• Traces offer a path through which requests travel as they move through different components of a system, allowing teams to visualize and analyze the end-to-end journey of transactions and interactions.

With this context in mind, let's explore how Kong Konnect and Dynatrace work together to build advanced observability processes using OpenTelemetry (OTel) standards.

OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry is an open source observability framework designed for cloud native software, formed from the merger of the OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects in 2019. Since then, OpenTelemetry has evolved to be the open standard approach to instrumenting, generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry data such as metrics, logs, and traces.

OpenTelemetry signals come from many sources such as traces and logs, auto-instrumented code libraries or custom instrumentation as well as metrics from 3rd-party vendor platforms. These signals can then be sent to external observability solutions for in-depth analysis and visualization.

While OpenTelemetry represents an amazing set of standards for how to ingest, modify and egress instrumentation data, it does not actually provide a platform for storing, visualizing and analyzing this data.

Dynatrace 

Dynatrace exists to make software work perfectly. Our platform combines broad and deep observability and continuous runtime application security with advanced AIOps to provide answers and intelligent automation from data. This enables innovators to modernize and automate cloud operations, deliver software faster and more securely, and ensure flawless digital experiences.

Dynatrace fully integrates with these open standards such as OpenTelemetry. As a leading committer to OpenTelemetry, Dynatrace works closely with the open source community to drive ongoing improvements, using our decades of experience in observability for insight into customer challenges and best practices.

Kong Konnect

Kong Gateway is a fundamental component of the Kong Konnect API management infrastructure, known for its platform-agnostic approach, scalability, and outstanding performance, all driven by its plugin-based extensibility. It centralizes critical functions such as proxying, routing, load balancing, and health checking, effectively managing both microservices and traditional API traffic.

A key strength of Kong Gateway is its extensibility, supported by a wide range of plugins that enable the implementation of various policies, including Authentication/Authorization, Rate Limiting, Proxy Caching, Requests and Responses Transformation, and Traffic Control.

Kong Konnect and Dynatrace integration

For observability, the OpenTelemetry plugin propagates traces, metrics, and logs to any OpenTelemetry compatible server. Below is a reference to the architectural layers of an application using Kong and how it might be observed with a combination of OpenTelemetry and Dynatrace.