akka tracing 0.4 released

What is it?

A distributed tracing Akka extension based on Twitter's Zipkin, which can be used as performance diagnostics and debugging tool.

It allows you to:

• trace call hierarchies inside an actor system;
• debug request processing pipelines (you can log to traces, annotate them with custom key-value pairs);
• see dependencies between derived requests and their contribution to resulting response time;
• find and analyse slowest requests in your system.

Distributed tracing approach used by Zipkin synergise with akka-remote and akka-cluster. Extension provides integration with Play framework and Spray toolkit.

It is better to see once:

0.4 changes

New features

• Play framework support (and activator template to demonstrate it);
• tracing flags support;
• akka.pattern.ask wrapper to simplify ask tracing;
• collector unavailability handling preventing excessive memory usage.

Improvements

• reusable thrift transport to reduce GC overhead;
• better interoperation with spray-json formats;
• improved test coverage;
• improved error handling and reporting;
• now extension doesn't produce any (internal messaging) overhead if disabled;
• improved automated http request annotating in Play and Spray integration modules;
• bug fixes.