HowTo: Observability of your GeneXus applications

GeneXus collects telemetry data (traces, logs, and metrics) of its applications with OpenTelemetry.

The purpose of this article is to explain the necessary steps to allow OpenTelemetry for your applications’ observability.

First of all, you have to configure your infrastructure to support observability, according with the Opentelemetry provider you will be using, and the Observability backend of your choice.

Then, follow these

Steps

1. Activate Observability in GeneXus.
In Observability Provider property, select the service provider.

• Observability with OpenTelemetry
  • Observability with Lightstep
• Observability with AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry
• Observability with Azure Monitor Application Insights

3. Build any object.
4. Deploy/Run.

Note
In case of Java applications, the deploy to docker automatically packages all the requirements and sets the environment settings to start the docker image and have the application observable without the need of any extra configuration.

If you are not using Docker containers, you have to follow the instructions of OpenTelemetry Java Automatic instrumentation. That is, download the Java Agent and add -javaagent:path/to/opentelemetry-javaagent.jar and other config to your JVM startup arguments.

Logs and traces correlation

Standardizing log correlation with traces and metrics, increase the value of observability.

This is the vision of OpenTelemetry’s collection of logs, traces and metrics:

The connection between Logs and Traces is achieved by registering the trace_id in the Logs.

To achieve this with GeneXus Java Generator, you only need to set the Log Format property = JSON and the Observability Provider property must take a value other than None.

Java Sample

Suppose you are working in a Java environment and you have configured the following properties:

Log Format property = JSON
Observability Provider property = Observability with AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry.

Then a Log showing this connection will look like this:

{
    "@timestamp": "2023-09-25T05:02:11.812Z",
    "ecs.version": "1.2.0",
    "log.level": "DEBUG",
    "message": "Hello, world!",
    "process.thread.name": "http-nio-8080-exec-165",
    "log.logger": "GeneXusUserLog.GBrain.Middleware.Utils.ResponseExtractText",
    "AWS-XRAY-TRACE-ID": "1-65111441-4939baba8728c6453e80769f@a6ad1d8bfe037e4f",
    "span_id": "a6ad1d8bfe037e4f",
    "trace_flags": "01",
    "trace_id": "651114414939baba8728c6453e80769f"
}

.NET Sample

Azure monitor Sample

• See Getting Opentelemetry logs in Application Insights.

Opentelemetry Sample

• HowTo: Watch .NET logs using OpenTelemetry (with SigNoz)

AWS Distro sample

• HowTo: Watching .NET logs at AWS CloudWatch