layout: post title: Instrumentation in Apache Kudu author: Todd Lipcon

Last week, the OpenTracing community invited me to their monthly Google Hangout meetup to give an informal talk on tracing and instrumentation in Apache Kudu.

While Kudu doesn't currently support distributed tracing using OpenTracing, it does have quite a lot of other types of instrumentation, metrics, and diagnostics logging. The OpenTracing team was interested to hear about some of the approaches that Kudu has used, and so I gave a brief introduction to topics including:

  • The Kudu diagnostics log which periodically logs metrics and stack traces.
  • The process-wide tracing support based on the open source tracing framework implemented by Google Chrome.
  • The stack watchdog which helps us find various latency outliers and issues in our libraries and the Linux kernel.
  • Heap sampling support which helps us understand unexpected memory usage.

If you're interested in learning about these topics and more, check out the video recording. My talk spans the first 34 minutes.

If you have any questions about this content or about Kudu in general, join the community