Traces from Events: A New Way to Visualise Kubernetes Activities
summary
A small program called k-span listens to Kubernetes Events, turns them into OpenTelemetry spans, and sends them to Jaeger so you get a timeline instead of raw kubectl output. It reconstructs parent‑child relationships by walking ownerReferences and synthesizes span durations by holding events until matching ones arrive. Demo shows one deployment operation becomes 14 spans from five components over about nine seconds. Works now but is finicky and still experimental.
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chapters (17)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:12Hi, I'm Bryan Boreham
- 1:34Kubernetes Events
- 2:02Viewing Events
- 2:45Let's see some Events
- 3:26Inside an Event
- 5:00Distributed Tracing
- 7:21Implementation: Kspan
- 8:05Demo!
- 10:36Deployment Update
- 16:16Object ownership chain
- 17:25How Kspan works
- 21:02Where can we go from here?
- 21:29More detail from Kubernetes
- 22:05More tailored GUI
- 22:45Upstream context
- 23:40Questions?
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