Interoperability From OpenTelemetry to Kieker: Demonstrated as Export from the Astronomy Shop

2025-10-13

AI Summary

Kieker’s observability capabilities are currently limited to a narrow set of languages (e.g., Java, C, Fortran, Python), hindering adoption in modern multi-language systems such as those using C# or JavaScript. To address this gap, we propose the first interoperability framework bridging OpenTelemetry and Kieker. Our approach introduces a distributed tracing data translation middleware that performs semantic mapping and format conversion from OpenTelemetry’s standardized telemetry protocol to Kieker’s event model. This enables unified ingestion of multi-language monitoring data into Kieker’s analysis stack, substantially extending its cross-language observability. Evaluation on the Astronomy Shop benchmark demonstrates accurate reconstruction and visualization of end-to-end call trees, validating both the completeness and practical utility of the transformation. Our work bridges a critical protocol compatibility gap in Kieker’s integration with contemporary observability ecosystems and provides a reusable technical pathway for retrofitting legacy analysis frameworks with emerging open standards.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Linked Open Data, Knowledge Graphs & KB Completion
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Knowledge Representation Languages
• Natural Language Processing: Interpretability, Analysis, and Evaluation of NLP Models

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Semantics and Knowledge: Scalable techniques for the creation, curation, publication, maintenance, and consumption of large, Web-based, structured, reusable, knowledge graphs and ontologies
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data

Abstract

The observability framework Kieker provides a range of analysis capabilities, but it is currently only able to instrument a smaller selection of languages and technologies, including Java, C, Fortran, and Python. The OpenTelemetry standard aims for providing reference implementations for most programming languages, including C# and JavaScript, that are currently not supported by Kieker. In this work, we describe how to transform OpenTelemetry tracing data into the Kieker framework. Thereby, it becomes possible to create for example call trees from OpenTelemetry instrumentations. We demonstrate the usability of our approach by visualizing trace data of the Astronomy Shop, which is an OpenTelemetry demo application.

Problem

• Transforming OpenTelemetry tracing data into Kieker framework
• Enabling call tree creation from OpenTelemetry instrumentations
• Visualizing trace data from OpenTelemetry demo applications

Innovation

• Convert OpenTelemetry traces to Kieker format
• Enable call tree generation from OpenTelemetry data
• Visualize trace data from OpenTelemetry demo applications