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Articles by Ken Hamric
Synthetic Monitoring With OpenTelemetry
Synthetic monitoring is used to proactively test and monitor production systems, ensuring performance, availability, key functionality and assessing user experience. There are several types of monitors, ranging from simple pings to fully automated web interactions. Modern engineering teams are now using OpenTelemetry and distributed tracing for production monitoring and troubleshooting, but mostly in a manual, reactive manner.
Testing the Observability Surface
Testing cloud native applications and services is usually done at the UI or API level to ensure that both of these “surfaces” meet both their functional and nonfunctional requirements. Unfortunately, these tests have no insight into the underlying components involved in the tested transactions. It results in a huge blind spot for testing that grows with the complexity and distributed nature of your application infrastructure.
Will the Real Test Observability Please Stand up?
The term “test observability” has started to appear in technical discussions and product marketing. However, its definition varies widely and is sometimes used in questionable ways. You could argue that it is good marketing but bad tech. Let’s discuss the marketing spin and the actual technical meaning of the words. By the end, we hope to clarify the true meaning of test observability. First, it might be helpful to define what observability is.
OpenTelemetry and Observability: Looking Forward
As we approach the end of the year, it’s a wonderful time to pause and reflect. 2023 was a landmark for OpenTelemetry, as its three fundamental signals, tracing, metrics and logging reached stable releases. This achievement signifies the realization of OpenTelemetry’s original vision to provide a standards-based framework for instrumenting and collecting observability data.
3 Ways Observability Matters in Cloud Native Testing
The benefits of these innovations have mainly been realized by site reliability engineers (SREs) and DevOps engineers in production troubleshooting. The visibility you get with these observability technologies is no less valuable in CI/CD pipelines when testing deployments. This value is just beginning to get recognized. We will look at three ways value can be realized by using distributed tracing for testing before moving code to production. First, a little background.
Where Does Trace-Based Testing Fit in the Testing Pyramid?
Trace-based testing is a new form of testing using observability data, namely OpenTelemetry-compatible distributed traces, collected in modern systems. It enables building integration and system tests quickly and easily, dramatically reducing the time and cost involved. You’re leveraging the time and effort already invested in instrumenting your distributed application to provide distributed traces.
Observability - Freeing Your Load Tests from the Black Box
The shift to cloud native architecture has fundamentally altered the tools needed to monitor, troubleshoot and optimize the performance of distributed applications and infrastructure. We have moved from having a monolith with simple logging, to using aggregated logs across several services, to now relying on the deep visibility provided by distributed tracing tools so we can visualize and understand our complex microservices. Troubleshooting tools have evolved! But what about performance testing?
Trace-Based Testing for a Distributed World
Testing has not changed significantly in the last decade in spite of radical shifts in the underlying system architectures that modern development teams use. Distributed architecture has introduced more complexity into both system testing and integration testing. While work has been done with mocking to attempt to recreate reality while providing isolation, it still proves to be lacking and unreliable for many teams.
5 Ways Trace-Based Testing Matters to SREs
While the development and QA staff have primary responsibility for testing, site reliability engineers (SREs) are typically responsible for the overall system and its availability. Unit tests are typically created and run in silos within individual teams, but integration, end-to-end and system tests must be conducted in a fuller environment that combines the work of multiple teams, technologies and more realistic deployment environments. This fuller environment is the domain of the SRE engineer.
Trace-Based Testing: The Next Step in Observability
Observability is one of the key constituents of cloud native technology for software engineers. In fact, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation Charter states that cloud native technologies “enable loosely coupled systems that are resilient, manageable and observable.” But why stop at simply observing system behavior?
Tracetest — Assertions, Versioning & CI/CD - Kubeshop
Est. reading time: Tracetest released v0.5 with new capabilities to enable you to create trace-based tests for your microservice based system. The release includes better assertions, versioning, & CI/CD capability.
Tracing the History of Distributed Tracing & OpenTelemetry
Est. reading time: A history of the birth of OpenTelemetry Tracing. From Dapper in 2010 to Zipkin, Jaeger, OpenTracing & OpenCensus, we discuss how the industry coalesced around OpenTelemetry over the last 14 years. Table of Contents Are you sitting comfortably? Then let’s begin our spooky tale, a tale of a time when no engineer could accurately know what had failed in their process, or pinpoint when things went wrong. What is Tracing?
Tracetest is released. What’s next? - Kubeshop
We [released Tracetest](https://github.com/kubeshop/tracetest) to the public last week. Yay! But what is next? Our team worked really hard to release the initial MVP version of Tracetest. Did you hear about our release? In short - Tracetest allows you to utilize the Opentelemetry tracing instrumentation to do deep integration and end-to-end testing…easily.
Introducing Tracetest - Trace-based Testing with OpenTelemetry
Est. reading time: Introducing Tracetest, a tool which allows easy creation of end-to-end tests via a simple user interface. Leverages your current investment in OpenTelemetry based tracing to make deep testing simple. Table of Contents Kubeshop, a Kubernetes project accelerator, is proud to introduce Tracetest, a tool which allows quick and easy creation of integration and end-to-end tests via a simple User Interface.
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