telemetry.html

---
layout: default
title: Open Source Telemetry Tools for Java, Scala, and Kotlin
description: >-
  Add a few lines of code and start collecting metrics, correlating requests, and tracing calls 
  to databases and external APIs from backend services running on the JVM
load_optimize: false
transparent_heading: true
footer_background: bg-lightest
redirect_from:
- /instrumentation/
custom_css:
- pages/telemetry
- prism
- code
---
<main>
  <div class="container-fluid navbar-offset">
    <div class="container">
      <section class="row bg-white pt-6 pb-0">
        <div class="col-12 text-center mt-lg-6">
          <img height="32" src="/assets/img/kamon/kamon-telemetry-logo-light.svg" alt="Kamon Telemetry Logo" loading="eager"/>
          <h1 class="display-4 mt-4">
            Generate metrics and traces
            <br class="d-none d-lg-inline">
            with minimal code changes
          </h1>
          <p class="lead my-4">
            Add a few lines of code and generate the metrics & traces you  
            <br class="d-none d-md-inline">
            need to troubleshoot production issues in Java, Scala, and Kotlin applications
          </p>

          <a class="btn btn-cta btn-primary shadow w-100-sm-down mr-3" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#apmOnboardingModal">
            Try Kamon Telemetry + APM
          </a>
          <div class="py-3 text-center text-md-left d-md-inline">
            <a class="plain-link" href="/docs/latest/guides/">
              Install Kamon Telemetry
            </a>
          </div>

          <img class="img-cover mt-6" style="max-height: 395px;" src="/assets/img/pages/telemetry/kamon-telemetry-showcase.png" alt="Generating Metrics and Traces with Kamon Telemetry"  loading="eager"/>
        </div>
      </section>
    </div>
  </div>

  <div class="container-fluid bg-lightest">
    <div class="container">
      <section class="row justify-content-center">
        <div class="col-12 col-xl-8 text-center">
          <div class="text-section-title py-4">Generate Metrics and Traces</div>
          <h2>
            Instrument your platform from end to end, automatically
          </h2>
          <p class="text-explainer px-3 px-xl-0 mb-5">
            Metrics are great for monitoring. Traces are great for debugging. You need both. Get a ton of insights 
            out of the box with automatic instrumentation, then enrich them with your own tags and custom metrics
          </p>
        </div>

        <div class="col-12 py-lg-4"></div>

        <!-- Automatic Instrumentation -->
        <div class="col-12 col-lg-5 mt-5">
          <div class="accordion-card my-2">
            <span class="text-tag text-tag-green">
              Automatic Instrumentation
            </span>
            <h4 class="mt-4">
              Get immediate insights into common libraries and frameworks
            </h4>
          </div>
          <div class="accordion-content text-feature-explainer mt-4">
            <p>Understanding how certain frameworks work under the hood can be really challenging, but we already did that for you</p>
            <p>Leverage automatic instrumentation to get started, and save your energy for enriching the default integrations</p>
            <p>Kamon Telemetry has built-in support for Spring, Play Framework, Akka, and a lot more</p>
            <img class="mt-3" style="max-height: 96px;" src="/assets/img/pages/telemetry/featured-integrations.png" alt="Monitor Spring, Play Framework, and Akka Applications with Kamon"  loading="eager"/>
          </div>
        </div>
        <div class="col-12 col-lg-7 mt-5">
          <img class="accordion-img" src="/assets/img/pages/telemetry/telemetry-status-page-instrumentations.png" alt="Kamon has built-in support for Spring, Akka, Play Framework, and a lot more">
        </div>

        <div class="col-12 py-3"></div>

        <!-- Simple Span Tagging -->
        <div class="col-12 col-lg-5 mt-5">
          <div class="accordion-card my-2">
            <span class="text-tag text-tag-green">
              Simple Span Tagging
            </span>
            <h4 class="mt-4">
              Add your own tags to automatic traces
            </h4>
          </div>
          <div class="accordion-content text-feature-explainer mt-4">
            <p>Adding tags like appVersion, userId, or request-specific data can help you narrow down issues when investigating</p>
            <p>Enrich the automatic instrumentation with your own tags and make it easier to troubleshoot issues later</p>
          </div>
        </div>
        <div class="col-12 col-lg-7 mt-5">
          <img class="accordion-img" src="/assets/img/pages/telemetry/telemetry-span-tagging.png" alt="Add tags like requestId and userId to your Spans using Kamon Telemetry">
        </div>

        <div class="col-12 py-3"></div>

        <!-- Manual Instrumentation -->
        <div class="col-12 col-lg-5 mt-5">
          <div class="accordion-card my-2">
            <span class="text-tag text-tag-green">
              Manual Instrumentation
            </span>
            <h4 class="mt-4">
              Get full control over the instrumentation, if you want to
            </h4>
          </div>
          <div class="accordion-content text-feature-explainer mt-4">
            <p>Want to do everything by hand? You got it</p>
            <p>
              Kamon separates the core instrumentation libraries from the automatic instrumentation, 
              so you can use the metrics and tracing APIs alone, and still be able to send data to any vendor 
            </p>
          </div>
        </div>
        <div class="col-12 col-lg-7 mt-5">
          <img class="accordion-img" src="/assets/img/pages/telemetry/telemetry-manual-instrumentation.png" alt="Create Spans programmatically using the Kamon Telemetry tracing APIs">
        </div>  

        <div class="col-12 py-3"></div>
        
        <!-- Custom Metrics -->
        <div class="col-12 col-lg-5 mt-5">
          <div class="accordion-card my-2">
            <span class="text-tag text-tag-green">
              Custom Metrics
            </span>
            <h4 class="mt-4">
              Measure the signals and metrics that matter to you
            </h4>
          </div>
          <div class="accordion-content text-feature-explainer mt-4">
            <p>Getting latency and error metrics out of the box is nice, but what about the other things you care about?</p>
            <p>Create your own metrics and track anything that is important to monitor your application’s health</p>
          </div>
        </div>
        <div class="col-12 col-lg-7 mt-5">
          <img class="accordion-img" src="/assets/img/pages/telemetry/telemetry-custom-metrics.png" alt="Create custom metrics using the Kamon Telemetry metrics API">
        </div>          
      </section>
    </div>
  </div>  



  <div class="container-fluid bg-white">
    <div class="container">
      <section class="row justify-content-center">
        <div class="col-12 col-xl-9 text-center">
          <div class="text-section-title py-4">Correlate Requests</div>
          <h2>
            Correlate requests across services and logs
          </h2>
          <p class="text-explainer px-3 px-xl-0">
            When your logs are flooded with tons of requests, you need a consistent identifier to 
            filter the logs and investigate a single request. Correlate requests with log statements, and across 
            service calls automatically with Kamon
          </p>
        </div>

        <div class="col-12 py-lg-4"></div>

        <div class="col-12 col-lg-8 mt-5">
          <img class="accordion-img no-shadow" src="/assets/img/pages/telemetry/telemetry-propagation.png" alt="Propagate requestId, traceId and other request data across services and integrated with logs">
        </div>
        
        <!-- Context Propagation -->
        <div class="col-12 col-lg-6 mt-5">
          <div class="accordion-card my-2 px-lg-5">
            <span class="text-tag text-tag-green">
              Context Propagation
            </span>
            <h4 class="mt-4">
              Propagate request-specific data across services
            </h4>
          </div>
          <div class="accordion-content text-feature-explainer mt-4 px-lg-5">
            <p>If you include tags like userId and requestId in your logs, you probably want those tags to propagate across services</p>
            <p>Kamon propagates context tags automatically with its own propagation protocol, and is compatible with W3C Trace Context, B3, and Uber-trace-id</p>
          </div>
        </div>       

        <!-- Logging Integration -->
        <div class="col-12 col-lg-6 mt-5">
          <div class="accordion-card my-2 px-lg-5">
            <span class="text-tag text-tag-green">
              Logging Integration
            </span>
            <h4 class="mt-4">
              Correlated your logs with the right request
            </h4>
          </div>
          <div class="accordion-content text-feature-explainer mt-4 px-lg-5">
            <p>When you combine asynchronous actions and jump across threads, correlating requests becomes harder than usual</p>
            <p>Ensure that log statements are connected to the right traceId and context, regardless of your threading model</p>
          </div>
        </div>
      </section>
    </div>
  </div>  



  <div class="container-fluid bg-lightest">
    <div class="container">
      <section>
        <div class="row justify-content-center">
          <div class="col-12 col-md-10 col-lg-8 mb-5">
            <img class="img-cover" style="max-height: 600px;" src="/assets/img/pages/telemetry/telemetry-connected-with-apm-and-others.png" alt="Monitor services with Kamon Telemetry and visualize the data in Kamon APM and other tools"  loading="eager"/>
          </div>
          <div class="col-12 col-xl-9 text-center">
            <div class="text-section-title py-4">Visualize Anywhere you Want</div>
            <h2>
              Visualize metrics and traces anywhere you want
            </h2>
            <p class="text-explainer px-3 px-xl-0">
              Getting metrics and traces out of your services is only half the battle. You still need to 
              send your telemetry data to a tool where you can visualize and analyze it
            </p>
          </div>
          <div class="col-12 py-lg-4"></div>
        </div>
        

        <!-- Works awesome with APM -->
        <div class="row flex-lg-row-reverse">
          <div class="col-12 col-lg-5 mt-5 px-4">         
            <div class="accordion-card my-2 pr-lg-5">
              <span class="text-tag text-tag-green">
                Awesome with Kamon APM
              </span>
              <h4 class="mt-4">
                Use the platform designed for Kamon Telemetry
              </h4>
            </div>
            <div class="accordion-content text-feature-explainer mt-4 pr-lg-5">
              <p>We created Kamon APM as the perfect tool to visualize the high-fidelity metrics generated with Kamon Telemetry</p>
              <p>Don’t waste time setting up your own infrastructure and give Kamon APM a try. You'll thank us later</p>
            </div>
          </div>
          <div class="col-12 col-lg-7 mt-5">
            <img class="accordion-img mb-5" src="/assets/img/pages/telemetry/telemetry-works-with-apm.png" alt="Kamon Telemetry works perfectly with Kamon APM">
          </div>
        </div>

        <div class="row">
          <div class="col-12 py-lg-4"></div>
        </div>

        <!-- Compatible with any vendor -->
        <div class="row flex-lg-row-reverse">
          <div class="col-12 col-lg-5 mt-5 px-4">
            <div class="accordion-card my-2 pr-lg-5">
              <span class="text-tag text-tag-green">
                Vendor Agnostic
              </span>
              <h4 class="mt-4">
                Use any vendor without changing instrumentation
              </h4>
            </div>
            <div class="accordion-content text-feature-explainer mt-4 pr-lg-5">
              <p>All Kamon instrumentation is independent from the components that send data to external systems</p>
              <p>You can send your data to Prometheus, Zipkin, OpenTelemetry-compatible endpoints, and more without changing the instrumentation</p>
            </div>
          </div>
          <div class="col-12 col-lg-7 mt-5">
            <img class="accordion-img mb-5" src="/assets/img/pages/telemetry/telemetry-multiple-reporters.png" alt="Kamon Telemetry can send data to Prometheus, Zipkin, and OpenTelemetry-compatible endpoints">
          </div>
        </div>
      </section>
    </div>
  </div> 
</main>