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…

Int32 ought to be enough for any table's identity column -- Most developers at some point We've all done it, creating a new table in SQL Server and giving it a nice auto-incrementing integer as the primary key. There's no way that table will ever reach 2,147,483,647 rows, right? Now, for most tables that's likely true, but the last thing you want is to be surprised when suddenly you can no longer insert…

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…

There are a number of useful performance counters exposed for System.Data.SqlClient that can provide some nice insight into what's going on under the hood of your applications. Today I found myself monitoring the NumberOfReclaimedConnections counter to track down some connections that weren't being properly disposed. It's certainly not ideal to need to log into the servers to monitor this, so I went off looking for how to expose this through our Datadog dashboards. On…