I continue to work on my Opentelemetry demo. Its main idea is to showcase traces across various technology stacks, including asynchronous communication via an MQTT queue. This week, I added a couple of components and changed the architecture. Here are some noteworthy learnings; note that some of them might not be entirely connected to OpenTelemetry. Here’s an updated diagram. New components appear in violet, and updated components appear in green.

If you like cool stories about how an engineer, faced with an impossible problem, overcame all odds and solved it, this post is not for you. This is a story of how I spent a non-trivial amount of time, how I hit a couple of walls, and how I nearly came back to square one. Why do I write it? The first reason is for me: I want to document my journey so if I ever think about trying again in the future, I’ll have some arguments against it.

I recently became interested in Logstash, and after playing with it for a while, I decided to create my own custom plugin for learning purpose. I chose to pull data from Reddit because a) I use it often and b) there’s no existing plugin that offers that.