Introducing Active Tracing (Tech Preview)

We're thrilled to announce the tech preview of Active Tracing, a significant advancement in Kong Konnect. This innovative feature unlocks unparalleled visibility into API traffic as it flows through Kong Gateway, empowering you to optimize performance, troubleshoot issues, and refine your API strategies. 

The need for targeted insights 

Intermittent service issues can be elusive and challenging to understand. To ensure optimal performance and reliability, it’s essential to have a clear view into your service’s behavior. This is where observability comes in — providing the ability to understand and contextualize system behavior even in the absence of known issues.

When critical services malfunction, pinpointing the root cause can be daunting. Is it a DNS issue, an upstream service anomaly, undetected failures, or a gateway problem? For platform operation teams, accessing component-level data is crucial for rapid mean time to resolution (MTTR).

However, generating and storing detailed telemetry data continuously may be detrimental to the performance of the service and unnecessary. This is where targeted, on-demand insights become invaluable — enabling teams to swiftly identify and resolve issues, minimizing service disruptions. 

Introducing Active Tracing

With Active Tracing, infrastructure administrators can initiate targeted “deep tracing” sessions in specific API gateway nodes. During an Active Tracing session, the selected gateway generates detailed, OpenTelemetry-compatible traces for all requests matching the sampling criteria. The detailed spans are captured for the entire request/response lifecycle. These traces can be visualized with Konnect’s built-in span viewer with no additional instrumentation or telemetry tools. Konnect’s Active Tracing capability offers exclusive, in-depth insights that can't be replicated by third-party telemetry tools.

By capturing detailed, component-level telemetry data, platform operations teams can gain a deeper understanding of their services’ performance, dependencies, and potential bottlenecks. This targeted approach to observability enables teams to optimize their services, reduce uncertainty, and improve overall system reliability. 

Key highlights

• Traces can be generated for a service (includes all routes) or per route
• Traces can be generated for all requests or those matching a sampling criteria
• Sampling criteria can be defined with simple expressions language (ex: http.method == “GET”)
• Trace spans and attributes adhere to open telemetry conventions
• Traces can be visualized in Konnect’s built-in trace viewer
• Trace sessions are retained in Konnect for up to 7 days