In my previous post I started looking at how you can leverage Akka.NET's new Phobos product to start logging actor system metrics to Datadog. In this post I'm going to start taking that a little further by exploring the tracing functionality it offers as well. Similar to the metrics side, Phobos provides a flexible platform that supports a variety of tracing systems, such as Zipkin, Jaeger, Application Insights, and also the OpenTracing standard. I'm a…

If you're here on my blog, you're probably well aware that I'm a fan of both Akka.NET and Datadog, and observability in general. In fact, I even blogged last year about creating my own Datadog sink for Akka.Monitoring (which is still available on NuGet and we still use it in production every day!). This scratched some of my itches in terms of getting visibility into my actor systems, but it still fell a little…

Akka.NET is a great toolkit for building concurrent and fault-tolerant systems by way of the actor model. Most think of actor systems as something you would just do on the server side of things, as part of building large distributed systems, but the approach works great for all sorts of applications. The recent release of Akka.NET 1.3 brought with it support for .NET Standard 1.6, so naturally I needed to try using…

If you know me you know that if I can't monitor something in Datadog it may as well not exist, so as I'm starting to roll out some Akka.NET systems naturally I needed to get some observability in there. There is already some basic StatsD support that ships in the core Akka.Monitoring packages, but that fell a little short of what I wanted. Namely, if your actor system is named mysystem and your actor…