Spring PetClinic SpringBoot Based Microservices On Kubernetes

90 minutes  

The goal of this workshop is to introduce the features of Splunk’s automatic discovery and configuration for Java.

The workshop scenario will be created by installing a simple (un-instrumented) Java microservices application in Kubernetes.

By following the simple steps to install the Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector and enabling automatic discovery and configuration for existing Java based deployments you will learn how easy it is to send metrics, traces and logs to Splunk Observability Cloud.

Prerequisites

  • Outbound SSH access to port 2222.
  • Outbound HTTP access to port 81.
  • Familiarity with the Linux command line.

During this workshop we will cover the following components:

  • Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring (IM)
  • Splunk automatic discovery and configuration for Java (APM)
    • Database Query Performance
    • AlwaysOn Profiling
  • Splunk Log Observer (LO)
  • Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM)

Splunk Synthetics is feeling a little left out here, but we cover that in other workshops

Last Modified Sep 27, 2024

Subsections of PetClinic Kubernetes Workshop

Architecture

5 minutes  

The Spring PetClinic Java application is a simple microservices application that consists of a frontend and backend services. The frontend service is a Spring Boot application that serves a web interface to interact with the backend services. The backend services are Spring Boot applications that serve RESTful API’s to interact with a MySQL database.

By the end of this workshop, you will have a better understanding of how to enable automatic discovery and configuration for your Java-based applications running in Kubernetes.

The diagram below details the architecture of the Spring PetClinic Java application running in Kubernetes with the Splunk OpenTelemetry Operator and automatic discovery and configuration enabled.

Splunk Otel Architecture Splunk Otel Architecture


Based on the example Josh Voravong created.

Last Modified Sep 27, 2024

Preparation of the Workshop instance

15 minutes  

The instructor will provide you with the login information for the instance that we will be using during the workshop.

When you first log into your instance, you will be greeted by the Splunk Logo as shown below. If you have any issues connecting to your workshop instance then please reach out to your Instructor.

$ ssh -p 2222 splunk@<ip-address>

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β–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ•‘β–ˆβ–ˆβ•‘     β–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ•—β•šβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ•”β•β–ˆβ–ˆβ•‘ β•šβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ•‘β–ˆβ–ˆβ•‘  β–ˆβ–ˆβ•—    β–ˆβ–ˆβ•”β• 
β•šβ•β•β•β•β•β•β•β•šβ•β•     β•šβ•β•β•β•β•β•β• β•šβ•β•β•β•β•β• β•šβ•β•  β•šβ•β•β•β•β•šβ•β•  β•šβ•β•    β•šβ•β•  
Last login: Mon Feb  5 11:04:54 2024 from [Redacted]
Waiting for cloud-init status...
Your instance is ready!
splunk@show-no-config-i-0d1b29d967cb2e6ff:~$ 

To ensure your instance is configured correctly, we need to confirm that the required environment variables for this workshop are set correctly. In your terminal run the following script and check that the environment variables are present and set with actual valid values:

. ~/workshop/petclinic/scripts/check_env.sh
ACCESS_TOKEN = <redacted>
REALM = <e.g. eu0, us1, us2, jp0, au0 etc.>
RUM_TOKEN = <redacted>
HEC_TOKEN = <redacted>
HEC_URL = https://<...>/services/collector/event
INSTANCE = <instance_name>

Please make a note of the INSTANCE environment variable value as this will used later to filter data in Splunk Observability Cloud.

For this workshop, all of the above are required. If any have values missing, please contact your Instructor.

Delete any existing OpenTelemetry Collectors

If you have previously completed a Splunk Observability workshop using this EC2 instance, you need to ensure that any existing installation of the Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector is deleted. This can be achieved by running the following command:

helm delete splunk-otel-collector
Last Modified Sep 27, 2024

Subsections of 2. Preparation

Deploy the Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector

To get Observability signals (metrics, traces and logs) into Splunk Observability Cloud the Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector needs to be deployed into the Kubernetes cluster.

For this workshop, we will be using the Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector Helm Chart. First we need to add the Helm chart repository to Helm and update to ensure the latest version:

helm repo add splunk-otel-collector-chart https://signalfx.github.io/splunk-otel-collector-chart && helm repo update
Using ACCESS_TOKEN={REDACTED}
Using REALM=eu0
"splunk-otel-collector-chart" has been added to your repositories
Using ACCESS_TOKEN={REDACTED}
Using REALM=eu0
Hang tight while we grab the latest from your chart repositories...
...Successfully got an update from the "splunk-otel-collector-chart" chart repository
Update Complete. ⎈Happy Helming!⎈

Splunk Observability Cloud offers wizards in the UI to walk you through the setup of the OpenTelemetry Collector on Kubernetes, but in the interest of time, we will use the Helm install command below. Additional parameters are set to enable the operator and automatic discovery and configuration.

  • --set="operator.enabled=true" - this will install the Opentelemetry operator that will be used to handle automatic discovery and configuration.
  • --set="certmanager.enabled=true" - this will install the required certificate manager for the operator.
  • --set="splunkObservability.profilingEnabled=true" - this enables Code Profiling via the operator.

To install the collector run the following command, do NOT edit this:

helm install splunk-otel-collector --version 0.111.0 \
--set="operator.enabled=true", \
--set="certmanager.enabled=true", \
--set="splunkObservability.realm=$REALM" \
--set="splunkObservability.accessToken=$ACCESS_TOKEN" \
--set="clusterName=$INSTANCE-k3s-cluster" \
--set="splunkObservability.profilingEnabled=true" \
--set="agent.service.enabled=true"  \
--set="environment=$INSTANCE-workshop" \
--set="splunkPlatform.endpoint=$HEC_URL" \
--set="splunkPlatform.token=$HEC_TOKEN" \
--set="splunkPlatform.index=splunk4rookies-workshop" \
splunk-otel-collector-chart/splunk-otel-collector \
-f ~/workshop/k3s/otel-collector.yaml
LAST DEPLOYED: Fri Apr 19 09:39:54 2024
NAMESPACE: default
STATUS: deployed
REVISION: 1
NOTES:
Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector is installed and configured to send data to Splunk Platform endpoint "https://http-inputs-o11y-workshop-eu0.splunkcloud.com:443/services/collector/event".

Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector is installed and configured to send data to Splunk Observability realm eu0.

[INFO] You've enabled the operator's auto-instrumentation feature (operator.enabled=true)! The operator can automatically instrument Kubernetes hosted applications.
  - Status: Instrumentation language maturity varies. See `operator.instrumentation.spec` and documentation for utilized instrumentation details.
  - Splunk Support: We offer full support for Splunk distributions and best-effort support for native OpenTelemetry distributions of auto-instrumentation libraries.

Ensure the Pods are reported as Running before continuing (this typically takes around 30 seconds).

kubectl get pods | grep splunk-otel 
splunk-otel-collector-certmanager-cainjector-5c5dc4ff8f-95z49   1/1     Running   0          10m
splunk-otel-collector-certmanager-6d95596898-vjxss              1/1     Running   0          10m
splunk-otel-collector-certmanager-webhook-69f4ff754c-nghxz      1/1     Running   0          10m
splunk-otel-collector-k8s-cluster-receiver-6bd5567d95-5f8cj     1/1     Running   0          10m
splunk-otel-collector-agent-tspd2                               1/1     Running   0          10m
splunk-otel-collector-operator-69d476cb7-j7zwd                  2/2     Running   0          10m

Ensure there are no errors reported by the Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector (press ctrl + c to exit) or use the installed awesome k9s terminal UI for bonus points!

kubectl logs -l app=splunk-otel-collector -f --container otel-collector
2021-03-21T16:11:10.900Z        INFO    service/service.go:364  Starting receivers...
2021-03-21T16:11:10.900Z        INFO    builder/receivers_builder.go:70 Receiver is starting... {"component_kind": "receiver", "component_type": "prometheus", "component_name": "prometheus"}
2021-03-21T16:11:11.009Z        INFO    builder/receivers_builder.go:75 Receiver started.       {"component_kind": "receiver", "component_type": "prometheus", "component_name": "prometheus"}
2021-03-21T16:11:11.009Z        INFO    builder/receivers_builder.go:70 Receiver is starting... {"component_kind": "receiver", "component_type": "k8s_cluster", "component_name": "k8s_cluster"}
2021-03-21T16:11:11.009Z        INFO    k8sclusterreceiver@v0.21.0/watcher.go:195       Configured Kubernetes MetadataExporter  {"component_kind": "receiver", "component_type": "k8s_cluster", "component_name": "k8s_cluster", "exporter_name": "signalfx"}
2021-03-21T16:11:11.009Z        INFO    builder/receivers_builder.go:75 Receiver started.       {"component_kind": "receiver", "component_type": "k8s_cluster", "component_name": "k8s_cluster"}
2021-03-21T16:11:11.009Z        INFO    healthcheck/handler.go:128      Health Check state change       {"component_kind": "extension", "component_type": "health_check", "component_name": "health_check", "status": "ready"}
2021-03-21T16:11:11.009Z        INFO    service/service.go:267  Everything is ready. Begin running and processing data.
2021-03-21T16:11:11.009Z        INFO    k8sclusterreceiver@v0.21.0/receiver.go:59       Starting shared informers and wait for initial cache sync.      {"component_kind": "receiver", "component_type": "k8s_cluster", "component_name": "k8s_cluster"}
2021-03-21T16:11:11.281Z        INFO    k8sclusterreceiver@v0.21.0/receiver.go:75       Completed syncing shared informer caches.       {"component_kind": "receiver", "component_type": "k8s_cluster", "component_name": "k8s_cluster"}
Deleting a failed installation

If you make an error installing the OpenTelemetry Collector you can start over by deleting the installation with the following command:

helm delete splunk-otel-collector
Last Modified Nov 11, 2024

Deploy the PetClinic Application

The first deployment of the application will be using prebuilt containers to give the base scenario: a regular Java microservices-based application running in Kubernetes that we want to start observing. So let’s deploy the application:

kubectl apply -f ~/workshop/petclinic/petclinic-deploy.yaml
deployment.apps/config-server created
service/config-server created
deployment.apps/discovery-server created
service/discovery-server created
deployment.apps/api-gateway created
service/api-gateway created
service/api-gateway-external created
deployment.apps/customers-service created
service/customers-service created
deployment.apps/vets-service created
service/vets-service created
deployment.apps/visits-service created
service/visits-service created
deployment.apps/admin-server created
service/admin-server created
service/petclinic-db created
deployment.apps/petclinic-db created
configmap/petclinic-db-initdb-config created
deployment.apps/petclinic-loadgen-deployment created
configmap/scriptfile created

At this point, we can verify the deployment by checking that the Pods are running. The containers need to be downloaded and started so this may take a couple of minutes.

kubectl get pods
NAME                                                            READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
splunk-otel-collector-certmanager-dc744986b-z2gzw               1/1     Running   0          114s
splunk-otel-collector-certmanager-cainjector-69546b87d6-d2fz2   1/1     Running   0          114s
splunk-otel-collector-certmanager-webhook-78b59ffc88-r2j8x      1/1     Running   0          114s
splunk-otel-collector-k8s-cluster-receiver-655dcd9b6b-dcvkb     1/1     Running   0          114s
splunk-otel-collector-agent-dg2vj                               1/1     Running   0          114s
splunk-otel-collector-operator-57cbb8d7b4-dk5wf                 2/2     Running   0          114s
petclinic-db-64d998bb66-2vzpn                                   1/1     Running   0          58s
api-gateway-d88bc765-jd5lg                                      1/1     Running   0          58s
visits-service-7f97b6c579-bh9zj                                 1/1     Running   0          58s
admin-server-76d8b956c5-mb2zv                                   1/1     Running   0          58s
customers-service-847db99f79-mzlg2                              1/1     Running   0          58s
vets-service-7bdcd7dd6d-2tcfd                                   1/1     Running   0          58s
petclinic-loadgen-deployment-5d69d7f4dd-xxkn4                   1/1     Running   0          58s
config-server-67f7876d48-qrsr5                                  1/1     Running   0          58s
discovery-server-554b45cfb-bqhgt                                1/1     Running   0          58s

Make sure the output of kubectl get pods matches the output as shown above. Ensure all the services are shown as Running (or use k9s to continuously monitor the status).

To test the application you need to obtain the public IP address of the instance you are running on. You can do this by running the following command:

curl http://ifconfig.me

You can validate if the application is running by visiting http://<IP_ADDRESS>:81 (replace <IP_ADDRESS> with the IP address you obtained above). You should see the PetClinic application running. The application is also running on ports 80 & 443 if you prefer to use those or port 81 is unreachable.

Pet shop Pet shop

Make sure the application is working correctly by visiting the All Owners (1) and Veterinarians (2) tabs, you should get a list of names in each case.

owners owners

Last Modified Nov 11, 2024

Verify Kubernetes Cluster metrics

10 minutes  

Once the installation has been completed, you can log in to Splunk Observability Cloud and verify that the metrics are flowing in from your Kubernetes cluster.

From the left-hand menu click on Infrastructure and select Kubernetes, then select the Kubernetes nodes pane. Once you are in the Kubernetes nodes view, change the Time filter from -4h to the last 15 minutes (-15m) to focus on the latest data.

Next, from the list of clusters, select the cluster name of your workshop instance (you can get the unique part from your cluster name by using the INSTANCE from the output from the shell script you ran earlier). (1)

NavigatorI NavigatorI

You can now select your node by clicking on it name (1) in the node list.

NavigatorII NavigatorII

Open the Hierarchy Map by clicking on the Hierarchy Map (1) link in the gray pane to show the graphical representation of your node.

NavigatorII NavigatorII

You will now only have your cluster visible. Scroll down the page to see the metrics coming in from your cluster. Locate the Node log events rate chart and click on a vertical bar to see the log entries coming in from your cluster.

logs logs

Last Modified Nov 11, 2024

Setting up automatic discovery and configuration for APM

10 minutes  

In this section we will enable automatic discovery and configuration for the Java services running in Kubernetes. This means that the OpenTelemetry Collector will look for Pod annotations that indicate that the Java application should be instrumented with the Splunk OpenTelemetry Java agent. This will allow us to get traces, spans, and profiling data from the Java services running on the cluster.

automatic discovery and configuration

It is important to understand that automatic discovery and configuration is designed to get trace, span & profiling data out of your application, without requiring code changes or recompilation.

This is a great way to get started with APM, but it is not a replacement for manual instrumentation. Manual instrumentation allows you to add custom spans, tags, and logs to your application, which can provide more context and detail to your traces.

For Java applications the OpenTelemetry Collector will look for the annotation instrumentation.opentelemetry.io/inject-java.

The annotation can have the value set true or to the namespace/daemonset of the OpenTelemetry Collector e.g. default/splunk-otel-collector. This allows working across namespaces and what we will use in this workshop.

Using the deployment.yaml

If you want your Pods to send traces automatically, you can add the annotation to the deployment.yaml as shown below. This will add the instrumentation library during the initial deployment. To speed things up we have done that for the following Pods:

  • admin-server
  • config-server
  • discovery-server
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: admin-server
  labels: 
    app.kubernetes.io/part-of: spring-petclinic
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: admin-server
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: admin-server
      annotations:
        instrumentation.opentelemetry.io/inject-java: "default/splunk-otel-collector"
Last Modified Sep 19, 2024

Subsections of 4. Automatic discovery and configuration

Patching the Deployment

To configure automatic discovery and configuration the deployments need to be patched to add the instrumentation annotation. Once patched, the OpenTelemetry Collector will inject the automatic discovery and configuration library and the Pods will be restarted in order to start sending traces and profiling data. First, confirm that the api-gateway does not have the splunk-otel-java image.

kubectl describe pods api-gateway | grep Image:
Image:         quay.io/phagen/spring-petclinic-api-gateway:0.0.2

Next, enable the Java automatic discovery and configuration for all of the services by adding the annotation to the deployments. The following command will patch the all deployments. This will trigger the OpenTelemetry Operator to inject the splunk-otel-java image into the Pods:

kubectl get deployments -l app.kubernetes.io/part-of=spring-petclinic -o name | xargs -I % kubectl patch % -p "{\"spec\": {\"template\":{\"metadata\":{\"annotations\":{\"instrumentation.opentelemetry.io/inject-java\":\"default/splunk-otel-collector\"}}}}}"
deployment.apps/config-server patched (no change)
deployment.apps/admin-server patched (no change)
deployment.apps/customers-service patched
deployment.apps/visits-service patched
deployment.apps/discovery-server patched (no change)
deployment.apps/vets-service patched
deployment.apps/api-gateway patched

There will be no change for the config-server, discovery-server and admin-server as these have already been patched.

To check the container image(s) of the api-gateway pod again, run the following command:

kubectl describe pods api-gateway | grep Image:
Image:         ghcr.io/signalfx/splunk-otel-java/splunk-otel-java:v1.30.0
Image:         quay.io/phagen/spring-petclinic-api-gateway:0.0.2

A new image has been added to the api-gateway which will pull splunk-otel-java from ghcr.io (if you see two api-gateway containers, the original one is probably still terminating, so give it a few seconds).

Navigate back to the Kubernetes Navigator in Splunk Observability Cloud. After a couple of minutes you will see that the Pods are being restarted by the operator and the automatic discovery and configuration container will be added. This will look similar to the screenshot below:

restart restart

Wait for the Pods to turn green in the Kubernetes Navigator, then go tho the next section.

Last Modified Sep 19, 2024

Viewing the data in Splunk APM

Log in to Splunk Observability Cloud, from the left-hand menu click on APM APM APM to see the data generated by the traces from the newly instrumented services. Change the Environment filter (1) to the name of your workshop instance in the dropdown box (this will be <INSTANCE>-workshop where INSTANCE is the value from the shell script you ran earlier) and make sure it is the only one selected.

apm apm

You will see the name (2) of the api-gateway service and metrics in the Latency and Request & Errors charts (you can ignore the Critical Alert, as it is caused by the sudden request increase generated by the load generator). You will also see the rest of the services appear.

Once you see the Customer service, Vets service and Visits services like show in the screenshot above, let’s click on the Service Map (3) pane to get ready for the next section.

Last Modified Nov 4, 2024

APM Features

15 minutes  

As we have seen in the previous section, once you enable automatic discovery and configuration on your services, traces are sent to Splunk Observability Cloud.

With these traces, Splunk will automatically generate Service Maps and RED Metrics. These are the first steps in understanding the behavior of your services and how they interact with each other.

In this next section, we are going to examine the traces themselves and what information they provide to help you understand the behavior of your services all without touching your code.

Last Modified Sep 19, 2024

Subsections of 5. APM Features

APM Service Map

apm map apm map

The above map shows all the interactions between all of the services. The map may still be in an interim state as it will take the Petclinic Microservice application a few minutes to start up and fully synchronize. Reducing the time filter to a custom time of 2 minutes will help. You can click on the Refresh button (1) on the top right of the screen. The initial startup-related errors (red dots) will eventually disappear.

Next, let’s examine the metrics that are available for each service that is instrumented and visit the request, error, and duration (RED) metrics Dashboard

For this exercise we are going to use a common scenario you would use if the service operation was showing high latency, or errors for example.

Select (click) on the Customer Service in the Dependency map (1), then make sure the customers-service is selected in the Services dropdown box (2). Next, select GET /Owners from the Operations dropdown (3)**.

This should give you the workflow with a filter on GET /owners (1) as shown below.

select a trace select a trace

Last Modified Nov 4, 2024

APM Trace

To pick a trace, select a line in the Service Requests & Errors chart (1), when the dot appears click to get a list of sample traces:

Once you have the list of sample traces, click on the blue (2) Trace ID Link (make sure it has the same three services mentioned in the Service Column.)

workflow-trace-pick workflow-trace-pick

This brings us the the Trace selected in the Waterfall view:

Here we find several sections:

  • The actual Waterfall Pane (1), where you see the trace and all the instrumented functions visible as spans, with their duration representation and order/relationship showing.
  • The Trace Info Pane (2), by default, shows the selected Span information (highlighted with a box around the Span in the Waterfall Pane).
  • The Span Pane (3), here you can find all the Tags that have been sent in the selected Span, You can scroll down to see all of them.
  • The process Pane, with tags related to the process that created the Span (scroll down to see as it is not in the screenshot).
  • The Trace Properties at the top of the right-hand pane by default is collapsed as shown.

waterfall waterfall

Last Modified Nov 4, 2024

APM Span

While we examine our spans, let’s look at several features that you get out of the box without code modifications when using automatic discovery and configuration on top of tracing:

First, in the Waterfall Pane, make sure the customers-service:SELECT petclinic or similar span is selected as shown in the screenshot below:

DB-query DB-query

  • The basic latency information is shown as a bar for the instrumented function or call, in our example, it took 17.8 Milliseconds.
  • Several similar Spans (1), are only visible if the span is repeated multiple times. In this case, there are 10 repeats in our example. (You can show/hide them all by clicking on the 10x and all spans will show in order)
  • Inferred Services: Calls made to external systems that are not instrumented, show up as a grey ‘inferred’ span. The Inferred Service or span in our case here is a call to the Mysql Database mysql:petclinic SELECT petclinic (2) as shown above our selected span.
  • Span Tags: In the Tag Pane, standard tags produced by the automatic discovery and configuration. In this case, the span is calling a Database, so it includes the db.statement tag (3). This tag will hold the DB query statement and is used by the Database call performed during this span. This will be used by the DB-Query Performance feature. We look at DB-Query Performance in the next section.
  • Always-on Profiling: IF the system is configured to and has captured Profiling data during a Span life cycle, it will show the number of Call Stacks captured in the Spans timeline (18 Call Stacks for the customer-service:GET /owners Span shown above). (4)

We will look at Profiling in the next section.

Last Modified Nov 4, 2024

Service Centric View

Splunk APM provide Service Centric Views that provide engineers a deep understanding of service performance in one centralized view. Now, across every service, engineers can quickly identify errors or bottlenecks from a service’s underlying infrastructure, pinpoint performance degradations from new deployments, and visualize the health of every third party dependency.

To see this dashboard for the api-gateway,Click on APM from the right hand menu bar and go to the Dependency Map. Make sure you have the api-gateway service selected in the Service Map, then click on the *View Service button in the top of the right-hand pane. This will bring you to the Service Centric View dashboard:

service_maps service_maps

This view, which is available for each of your instrumented services, offers an overview of Service metrics, Runtime metrics and Infrastructure metrics.

You can select the Back function of you browser to go back to the previous view.

Last Modified Nov 4, 2024

Always-On Profiling & DB Query Performance

15 minutes  

As we have seen in the previous chapter, you can trace your interactions between the various services using APM without touching your code, which will allow you to identify issues faster.

However, besides tracing automatic discovery and configuration offers additional features out of the box that can help you find issues even faster. In this section we are going to look at two of them:

  • Always-on Profiling and Java Metrics
  • Database Query Performance

If you want to dive deeper into Always-on Profiling or DB-Query performance, we have a separate Ninja Workshop called Debug Problems in Microservices that you can follow.

Last Modified Sep 19, 2024

Subsections of 6. Advanced Features

Always-On Profiling & Metrics

When we installed the Splunk Distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector using the Helm chart earlier, we configured it to enable AlwaysOn Profiling and Metrics. This means that the collector will automatically generate CPU and Memory profiles for the application and send them to Splunk Observability Cloud.

When you deploy the PetClinic application and set the annotation, the collector automatically detects the application and instruments it for traces and profiling. We can verify this by examining the startup logs of one of the Java containers we are instrumenting by running the following script:

The logs should show what flags were picked up by the Java automatic discovery and configuration:

.  ~/workshop/petclinic/scripts/get_logs.sh
2024/02/15 09:42:00 Problem with dial: dial tcp 10.43.104.25:8761: connect: connection refused. Sleeping 1s
2024/02/15 09:42:01 Problem with dial: dial tcp 10.43.104.25:8761: connect: connection refused. Sleeping 1s
2024/02/15 09:42:02 Connected to tcp://discovery-server:8761
Picked up JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS:  -javaagent:/otel-auto-instrumentation-java/javaagent.jar
Picked up _JAVA_OPTIONS: -Dspring.profiles.active=docker,mysql -Dsplunk.profiler.call.stack.interval=150
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM warning: Sharing is only supported for boot loader classes because bootstrap classpath has been appended
[otel.javaagent 2024-02-15 09:42:03:056 +0000] [main] INFO io.opentelemetry.javaagent.tooling.VersionLogger - opentelemetry-javaagent - version: splunk-1.30.1-otel-1.32.1
[otel.javaagent 2024-02-15 09:42:03:768 +0000] [main] INFO com.splunk.javaagent.shaded.io.micrometer.core.instrument.push.PushMeterRegistry - publishing metrics for SignalFxMeterRegistry every 30s
[otel.javaagent 2024-02-15 09:42:07:478 +0000] [main] INFO com.splunk.opentelemetry.profiler.ConfigurationLogger - -----------------------
[otel.javaagent 2024-02-15 09:42:07:478 +0000] [main] INFO com.splunk.opentelemetry.profiler.ConfigurationLogger - Profiler configuration:
[otel.javaagent 2024-02-15 09:42:07:480 +0000] [main] INFO com.splunk.opentelemetry.profiler.ConfigurationLogger -                  splunk.profiler.enabled : true
[otel.javaagent 2024-02-15 09:42:07:505 +0000] [main] INFO com.splunk.opentelemetry.profiler.ConfigurationLogger -                splunk.profiler.directory : /tmp
[otel.javaagent 2024-02-15 09:42:07:505 +0000] [main] INFO com.splunk.opentelemetry.profiler.ConfigurationLogger -       splunk.profiler.recording.duration : 20s
[otel.javaagent 2024-02-15 09:42:07:506 +0000] [main] INFO com.splunk.opentelemetry.profiler.ConfigurationLogger -               splunk.profiler.keep-files : false
[otel.javaagent 2024-02-15 09:42:07:510 +0000] [main] INFO com.splunk.opentelemetry.profiler.ConfigurationLogger -            splunk.profiler.logs-endpoint : http://10.13.2.38:4317
[otel.javaagent 2024-02-15 09:42:07:513 +0000] [main] INFO com.splunk.opentelemetry.profiler.ConfigurationLogger -              otel.exporter.otlp.endpoint : http://10.13.2.38:4317
[otel.javaagent 2024-02-15 09:42:07:513 +0000] [main] INFO com.splunk.opentelemetry.profiler.ConfigurationLogger -           splunk.profiler.memory.enabled : true
[otel.javaagent 2024-02-15 09:42:07:515 +0000] [main] INFO com.splunk.opentelemetry.profiler.ConfigurationLogger -             splunk.profiler.tlab.enabled : true
[otel.javaagent 2024-02-15 09:42:07:516 +0000] [main] INFO com.splunk.opentelemetry.profiler.ConfigurationLogger -        splunk.profiler.memory.event.rate : 150/s
[otel.javaagent 2024-02-15 09:42:07:516 +0000] [main] INFO com.splunk.opentelemetry.profiler.ConfigurationLogger -      splunk.profiler.call.stack.interval : PT0.15S
[otel.javaagent 2024-02-15 09:42:07:517 +0000] [main] INFO com.splunk.opentelemetry.profiler.ConfigurationLogger -  splunk.profiler.include.internal.stacks : false
[otel.javaagent 2024-02-15 09:42:07:517 +0000] [main] INFO com.splunk.opentelemetry.profiler.ConfigurationLogger -      splunk.profiler.tracing.stacks.only : false
[otel.javaagent 2024-02-15 09:42:07:517 +0000] [main] INFO com.splunk.opentelemetry.profiler.ConfigurationLogger - -----------------------
[otel.javaagent 2024-02-15 09:42:07:518 +0000] [main] INFO com.splunk.opentelemetry.profiler.JfrActivator - Profiler is active.
We are interested in the section written by the com.splunk.opentelemetry.profiler.ConfigurationLogger or the Profiling Configuration.

We can see the various settings you can control, some that are useful depending on your use case like the splunk.profiler.directory - The location where the agent writes the call stacks before sending them to Splunk. This may be different depending on how you configure your containers.

Another parameter you may want to change is splunk.profiler.call.stack.interval This is how often the system takes a CPU Stack trace. You may want to reduce this if you have short spans like we have in our application. (we kept the default as the spans in this demo application are extremely short, so Span may not always have a CPU Call Stack related to it.)

You can find how to set these parameters here. Below, is how you set a higher collection rate for call stack in your deployment.yaml, exactly how to pass any JAVA option to the Java application running in your container:

env: 
- name: JAVA_OPTIONS
  value: "-Xdebug -Dsplunk.profiler.call.stack.interval=150"

If you don’t see those lines as a result of the script, the startup may have taken too long and generated too many connection errors, try looking at the logs directly with kubectl or the k9s utility that is installed.

Last Modified Sep 19, 2024

Always-On Profiling in the Trace Waterfall

Make sure you have your original (or similar) Trace & Span (1) selected in the APM Waterfall view and select Memory Stack Traces (2) from the right-hand pane:

profiling from span profiling from span

The pane should show you the Memory Stack Trace Flame Graph (3), you can scroll down and/or make the pane for a better view by dragging the right side of the pane.

As AlwaysOn Profiling is constantly taking snapshots, or stack traces, of your application’s code and reading through thousands of stack traces is not practical, AlwaysOn Profiling aggregates and summarizes profiling data, providing a convenient way to explore Call Stacks in a view called the Flame Graph. It represents a summary of all stack traces captured from your application. You can use the Flame Graph to discover which lines of code might be causing performance issues and to confirm whether the changes you make to the code have the intended effect.

To dive deeper into the Always-on Profiling, select Span (3) in the Profiling Pane under Memory Stack Traces This will bring you to the Always-on Profiling main screen, with the Memory view pre-selected:

Profiling main Profiling main

  • Time filter will be set to the time frame of the span we selected (1)
  • Java Memory Metric Charts (2), Allow you to Monitor Heap Memory, Application Activity like Memory Allocation Rate and Garbage Collecting Metrics.
  • Ability to focus/see metrics and Stack Traces only related to the Span (3), This will filter out background activities running in the Java application if required.
  • Java Function calls identified. (4), allowing you to drill down into the Methods called from that function.
  • The Flame Graph (5), with the visualization of hierarchy based on the stack traces of the profiled service.
  • Ability to select the Service instance (6) in case the service spins up multiple version of it self.

For further investigation the UI let’s you grab the actual stack trace, by selecting a function and the relevant line from the flam chart, so you can use in your coding platform to go to the actual lines of code used at this point (depending of course on your preferred Coding platform)

Last Modified Nov 4, 2024

Database Query Performance

With Database Query Performance, you can monitor the impact of your database queries on service availability directly in Splunk APM. This way, you can quickly identify long-running, un-optimized, or heavy queries and mitigate issues they might be causing, without having to instrument your databases.

To look at the performance of your database queries, make sure you are on the APM Service Map page either by going back in the browser or navigating to the APM section in the Menu bar, then click on the Service Map tile. Select the inferred database service mysql:petclinic Inferred Database server in the Dependency map (1), then scroll the right-hand pane to find the Database Query Performance Pane (2).

DB-query from map DB-query from map

If the service you have selected in the map is indeed an (inferred) database server, this pane will populate with the top 90% (P90) database calls based on duration. To dive deeper into the db-query performance function click somewhere on the word Database Query Performance at the top of the pane.

This will bring us to the DB-query Performance overview screen:

DB-query full DB-query full

Database Query Normalization

By default, Splunk APM instrumentation sanitizes database queries to remove or mask sensible data, such as secrets or personally identifiable information (PII) from the db.statements. You can find how to turn off database query normalization here.

This screen will show us all the Database queries (1) done towards our database from your application, based on the Traces & Spans sent to the Splunk Observability Cloud. Note that you can compare them across a time block or sort them on Total Time, P90 Latency & Requests (2).

For each Database query in the list, we see the highest latency, the total number of calls during the time window and the number of requests per second (3). This allows you to identify places where you might optimize your queries.

You can select traces containing Database Calls via the two charts in the right-hand pane (5). Use the Tag Spotlight pane (6) to drill down what tags are related to the database calls, based on endpoints or tags.

If you need to see a detailed view of a query:

details details

Click on the specific Query (1), this wil give you a detailed query Details pane (2), which you can use for more detailed investigations:

Last Modified Nov 4, 2024

Log Observer

10 minutes  

Up until this point, there have been no code changes, yet tracing, profiling and Database Query Performance data is being sent to Splunk Observability Cloud.

Next we will work with the Splunk Log Observer to the mix to obtain log data from the Spring PetClinic application.

The Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector automatically collects logs from the Spring PetClinic application and sends them to Splunk Observability Cloud using the OTLP exporter, annotating the log events with trace_id, span_id and trace flags.

The Splunk Log Observer is then used to view the logs and with the changes to the log format the platform can automatically correlate log information with services and traces.

This feature is called Related Content.

Last Modified Sep 19, 2024

Subsections of 7. Log Observer

Related Content

In the bottom pane is where any related content will be reported. In the screenshot below you can see that APM has found a trace that is related to this log line (1):

RC RC

By clicking (2) on Trace for 960432ac9f16b98be84618778905af50 we will be taken to the waterfall in APM for this specific trace, where this log line was generated:

waterfall logs waterfall logs

Note that you now have a Related Content pane for Logs appear (1). Clicking on this will take you back to Log Observer and will display all the log lines that are part of this trace.

Last Modified Nov 4, 2024

Real User Monitoring

10 minutes  

To enable Real User Monitoring (RUM) instrumentation for an application, you need to add the Open Telemetry Javascript https://github.com/signalfx/splunk-otel-js-web snippet to the code base.

The Spring PetClinic application uses a single index HTML page, that is reused across all views of the application. This is the perfect location to insert the Splunk RUM instrumentation library as it will be loaded for all pages automatically.

The api-gateway service is already running the instrumentation and sending RUM traces to Splunk Observability Cloud and we will review the data in the next section.

If you want you can verify the snippet, you can view the page source in your browser by right-clicking on the page and selecting View Page Source.

    <script src="/env.js"></script>  
    <script src="https://cdn.signalfx.com/o11y-gdi-rum/latest/splunk-otel-web.js" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
    <script src="https://cdn.signalfx.com/o11y-gdi-rum/latest/splunk-otel-web-session-recorder.js" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
    <script>
        var realm = env.RUM_REALM;
        console.log('Realm:', realm);
        var auth = env.RUM_AUTH;
        var appName = env.RUM_APP_NAME;
        var environmentName = env.RUM_ENVIRONMENT
        if (realm && auth) {
            SplunkRum.init({
                realm: realm,
                rumAccessToken: auth,
                applicationName: appName,
                deploymentEnvironment: environmentName,
                version: '1.0.0',
            });
    
            SplunkSessionRecorder.init({
                app: appName,
                realm: realm,
                rumAccessToken: auth
            });
            const Provider = SplunkRum.provider; 
            var tracer=Provider.getTracer('appModuleLoader');
        } else {
        // Realm or auth is empty, provide default values or skip initialization
        console.log("Realm or auth is empty. Skipping Splunk Rum initialization.");
        }
    </script>
     <!-- Section added for  RUM -->
Last Modified Sep 27, 2024

Subsections of 8. Real User Monitoring

Select the RUM view for the Petclinic App

Lets start a quick high level tour into RUM by clicking RUM in the left-hand menu. Then change the Environment filter (1) to the name of your workshop instance from the dropdown box, it will be <INSTANCE>-workshop (1) (where INSTANCE is the value from the shell script you ran earlier). Make sure it is the only one selected.

Then change the App (2) dropdown box to the name of your app, it will be <INSTANCE>-store

rum select rum select

Once you have selected your Environment and App, you will see an overview page showing the RUM status of your App (if your Summary Dashboard is just a single row of numbers, you are looking at the condensed view. You can expand it by clicking on the > (1) in front of the Application name). If any JavaScript error occurred they will show up as shown below:

rum overview rum overview

To continue, click on the blue link (with your workshop name) to get to the details page, this will bring up a new dashboard view breaking down the interactions by UX Metrics, Front-end Health, Back-end Health and Custom Events and comparing them to historic metrics (1 hour by default).

rum  main rum  main Normally you have only one line inside the first chart, Click on the link that relates to your Petclinic shop, http://198.19.249.202:81 in our example:

This will bring us to the Tag Spotlight page.

Last Modified Nov 11, 2024

RUM trace Waterfall view & linking to APM

In the TAG Spotlight view, you are presented with all the tags associated with the RUM data. Tags are key-value pairs that are used to identify the data. In this case, the tags are automatically generated by the OpenTelemetry instrumentation. The tags are used to filter the data and to create the charts and tables. The Tag Spotlight view allows you detect trends in behavior and to drill down into a user session.

RUM TAG RUM TAG

Click on User Sessions (1), this will show you the list of user session that occurred during the time window. We want to look at one of the session , so click on Duration (2) to sort on duration, and make sure you click on the link of one of the longer ones (3):

User sessions User sessions

Last Modified Sep 27, 2024

RUM trace Waterfall view & linking to APM

We are now looking at the RUM Trace waterfall, this will tell you what happened during the session on the user device as they visited the page of our petclinic application.

If you scroll down the waterfall find click on the #!/owners/details segment on the right (1), you see a list of action that occurred during the handling of the Vets request. Note, that the HTTP request have a blue APM link before the return code. Pick one, and click on the APM link. This will show you the APM info for this Ser vice call to our Microservices in Kubernetes.

rum apm link rum apm link

Note , that there give you the information what happened during action in the Microservices, and if you want to drill down to verify what happened with the request, click on the Trace ID url.

This will show you the trace related to your request from RUM:

RUm-apm linked RUm-apm linked

You can see that the entry point into your service now has a RUM (1) related content link added, allowing you to return back to your RUM session after you validated what happened in your Microservices.

Last Modified Nov 4, 2024

Workshop Wrap-up 🎁

Congratulations, you have completed the Get the Most Out of Your Existing Kubernetes Java Applications Using Automatic Discovery and Configuration With OpenTelemetry workshop.

Today, you have learnt how easy it is to add Tracing, Code Profiling and Database Query Performance to your existing Java application in Kubernetes.

You immediately improved the observability of the application and infrastructure with out touching a line of code or configuration using Automatic Discovery and Configuration.

You also learnt that with simple configuration changes you can add even more observability (logging and RUM) to the application in order to provide end-to-end observability.

Champagne Champagne