The Amazing Trace: Enhancing Distributed WebAssembly With OTEL- Brooks Townsend
summary
WasmbCloud adds OpenTelemetry tracing across the runtime, capability providers, and the WebAssembly boundary by instrumenting the host and using an Erlang shim to create and link spans so modules require no code changes; traces export via a simple OTEL exporter to Honeycomb/Tempo. Traces reach depths like 342-depth traces and 81-span traces, which turns hours of debugging into a single call stack view. Challenges include async/span propagation across Elixir and Rust and no in-module Wasm tracing yet.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (13)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:41Neither Web, nor Assembly
- 3:19But there are some gaps
- 4:37Modern Computing Env
- 8:07Capabilities
- 9:19Composable Actors
- 9:41Lattice Network
- 10:45A Simple wasmCloud App
- 14:36wasmCloud Components to Trace
- 15:34wasmCloud Host Architecture
- 21:21Difficulties in Implementation.
- 23:39What's Next?
- 25:42References
related talks
27mObserving the Future: Embracing OTEL in WebAssembly
25mObservability at the Edge: Instrumenting WebAssembly with OpenTelemetry
24mMeta-tracing Interpreters in WebAssembly
35mPiercing the Veil of WebAssembly in Production
28mUnlocking Observability in WebAssembly with OpenTelemetry
35mExploring the Landscape for Open Telemetry for Wasm
30mOTel Meets Wasm: Rethinking OpenTelemetry Collector Extensibility
29mOTel Me About It: Latest Updates in WASI OTel