VictoriaTraces: Tracing, Observability, and OpenTelemetry0
On the project, we’ve gradually grown to the point where it’s time to have proper tracing – to build real observability, not just monitoring.
A long time ago I did something similar with Jaeger – a monster, and it kind of stayed in my drafts from 2019 or 2020. Since right now our entire stack is VictoriaMetrics – VictoriaMetrics itself for metrics and VictoriaLogs for logs – we’ll use a solution from the VictoriaMetrics team for traces too: VictoriaTraces.
On top of that, VictoriaTraces is much lighter both in resources and in setup. You can probably compare Loki vs VictoriaLogs – and Jaeger vs VictoriaTraces: same story, a much simpler setup, much less CPU/RAM.
This post was planned as the first in a series on traces – so the first half here will be more theoretical, on Observability and OpenTelemetry. And in the second half, we’ll spin up VictoriaTraces in Kubernetes.
In the previous post OpenTelemetry: OTel Collectors in Kubernetes and integration with VictoriaMetrics stack I described a pure OpenTelemetry stack for metrics and logs, and in this post I’ll be referring back to it.
And in the next one, the third – we’ll look at how to create traces from Python.