Interoperability From Kieker to OpenTelemetry: Demonstrated as Export to ExplorViz

Abstract: While the observability framework Kieker has a low overhead for tracing, its results currently cannot be used in most analysis tools due to lack of interoperability of the data formats. The OpenTelemetry standard aims for standardizing observability data. In this work, we describe how to export Kieker distributed tracing data to OpenTelemetry. This is done using the pipe-and-filter framework TeeTime. For TeeTime, a stage was defined that uses Kieker execution data, which can be created from most record types. We demonstrate the usability of our approach by visualizing trace data of TeaStore in the ExplorViz visualization tool.