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Distributed tracing overview

As a service owner, you can use distributed tracing to instrument your services to gather insights into your service architecture. You can use the Red Hat OpenShift distributed tracing platform for monitoring, network profiling, and troubleshooting the interaction between components in modern, cloud-native, microservices-based applications.

With the distributed tracing platform, you can perform the following functions:

  • Monitor distributed transactions

  • Optimize performance and latency

  • Perform root cause analysis

The distributed tracing platform consists of three components:

  • Red Hat OpenShift distributed tracing platform (Jaeger), which is based on the open source Jaeger project.

  • Red Hat OpenShift distributed tracing platform (Tempo), which is based on the open source Grafana Tempo project.

  • Red Hat build of OpenTelemetry, which is based on the open source OpenTelemetry project.

Component versions in the Red Hat OpenShift distributed tracing platform 3.0

Operator Component Version

Red Hat OpenShift distributed tracing platform (Jaeger)

Jaeger

1.51.0

Red Hat build of OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry

0.89.0

Red Hat OpenShift distributed tracing platform (Tempo)

Tempo

2.3.0

Red Hat OpenShift distributed tracing platform (Jaeger)

Deprecated functionality

In Red Hat OpenShift distributed tracing 3.0, Jaeger and Elasticsearch are deprecated, and both are planned to be removed in a future release. Red Hat will provide critical and above CVE bug fixes and support for these components during the current release lifecycle, but these components will no longer receive feature enhancements.

In Red Hat OpenShift distributed tracing 3.0, Tempo provided by the Tempo Operator and the OpenTelemetry collector provided by the Red Hat build of OpenTelemetry are the preferred Operators for distributed tracing collection and storage. The OpenTelemetry and Tempo distributed tracing stack is to be adopted by all users because this will be the stack that will be enhanced going forward.

New features and enhancements

This update introduces the following enhancements for the distributed tracing platform (Jaeger):

  • Support for the ARM architecture.

  • Support for cluster-wide proxy environments.

Bug fixes

This update introduces the following bug fixes for the distributed tracing platform (Jaeger):

  • Fixed support for disconnected environments when using the oc adm catalog mirror CLI command. (TRACING-3546)

Known issues

  • Currently, Apache Spark is not supported.

  • Currently, the streaming deployment via AMQ/Kafka is not supported on the IBM Z and IBM Power Systems architectures.

Red Hat OpenShift distributed tracing platform (Tempo)

New features and enhancements

This update introduces the following enhancements for the distributed tracing platform (Tempo):

  • Support for the ARM architecture.

  • Support for span request count, duration, and error count (RED) metrics. The metrics can be visualized in the Jaeger console deployed as part of Tempo or in the web console in the Observe menu.

Bug fixes

This update introduces the following bug fixes for the distributed tracing platform (Tempo):

  • Fixed support for the custom TLS CA option for connecting to object storage. (TRACING-3462)

  • Fixed support for disconnected environments when using the oc adm catalog mirror CLI command. (TRACING-3523)

  • Fixed mTLS when Gateway is not deployed. (TRACING-3510)

Known issues

  • Currently, when used with the Tempo Operator, the Jaeger UI only displays services that have sent traces in the last 15 minutes. For services that did not send traces in the last 15 minutes, traces are still stored but not displayed in the Jaeger UI. (TRACING-3139)

  • Currently, the distributed tracing platform (Tempo) fails on the IBM Z (s390x) architecture. (TRACING-3545)

Getting support

If you experience difficulty with a procedure described in this documentation, or with OpenShift Container Platform in general, visit the Red Hat Customer Portal. From the Customer Portal, you can:

  • Search or browse through the Red Hat Knowledgebase of articles and solutions relating to Red Hat products.

  • Submit a support case to Red Hat Support.

  • Access other product documentation.

To identify issues with your cluster, you can use Insights in OpenShift Cluster Manager Hybrid Cloud Console. Insights provides details about issues and, if available, information on how to solve a problem.

If you have a suggestion for improving this documentation or have found an error, submit a Jira issue for the most relevant documentation component. Please provide specific details, such as the section name and OpenShift Container Platform version.

Making open source more inclusive

Red Hat is committed to replacing problematic language in our code, documentation, and web properties. We are beginning with these four terms: master, slave, blacklist, and whitelist. Because of the enormity of this endeavor, these changes will be implemented gradually over several upcoming releases. For more details, see our CTO Chris Wright’s message.