You can monitor ABL applications, which include ABL clients and PAS for OpenEdge agents, using OpenTelemetry (OTel) to gain visibility into their performance and behavior. ABL applications enabled for OTel tracing generate trace data, which can be analyzed using an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool. This analysis provides insights into the potential issues within your application and can help you optimize its performance.

OTel is an open-source observability framework designed to instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data, such as traces. Tracing, a specific component of OTel, allows you to observe traceable internal operations of the application while it carries out a request.

The key concepts within OTel tracing are:
  • Trace Context—An identifier for a trace that allows the APM tool to relate trace data generated by different contributors to a common operation or request. The trace context is formed by hierarchical collection of spans.
  • Span—A unit of work or operation with a starting and an ending point. The root span of a trace is created when the trace begins.
Monitoring ABL applications using OTel tracing does not require any changes to the ABL code. Depending on your monitoring requirements, you can enable OTel tracing for the ABL client, PAS for OpenEdge agent, or both:
  • When you enable tracing in only the ABL client, it generates trace data and sends it to the OTel Collector using the OTLP protocol. The OTel Collector then forwards trace data to the APM tool. For more information, see OpenTelemetry tracing for ABL client.
  • When you enable tracing in only the PAS for OpenEdge agent, it generates trace data and sends it to the OTel Collector using the OTLP protocol. The OTel Collector then forwards trace data to the APM tool. For more information, see OpenTelemetry tracing for PAS for OpenEdge agent.
  • When you enable tracing in both the ABL client and the PAS for OpenEdge agent, the ABL client generates trace data and sends it to the OTel Collector. Additionally, the ABL client shares trace context with the PAS for OpenEdge agent, which uses the shared trace context to link its own generated trace data with that of the ABL client. It then sends trace data to the OTel Collector using the OTLP protocol. The OTel Collector then forwards trace data to the APM tool. For more information, see OpenTelemetry tracing for ABL client and PAS for OpenEdge agent.
Note: If you are accessing the PAS for OpenEdge agent using the Java OpenClient and want to enable the Java OpenClient to participate in tracing along with the PAS for OpenEdge agent, you must instrument Java program along with the Java OpenClient. For information about instrumenting Java program, see https://opentelemetry.io/docs/instrumentation/java/automatic/

After Java program is instrumented for OTel tracing, the Java OpenClient automatically sends the trace context to the PAS for OpenEdge agent, which enables the APM tool to correlate trace data generated by the PAS for OpenEdge agent with your Java OpenClient.