Consider implementing the OpenTelemetry standard to provide cross application message tracing/debugging

[Laurens-makel]

https://opentelemetry.io/ https://opentelemetry.io/docs/

OpenTelemetry, also known as OTel for short, is a vendor-neutral open-source Observability framework for instrumenting, generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry data such as traces, metrics, logs. As an industry-standard, it is natively supported by a number of vendors.

I'd like to bring up OpenTelemetry because this seems closely related to what issues Ladybug is solving.

The standard is used by tools such as Grafana Tempo, it would be very interesting if Ladybug is able to:

• Expose an API to import data collected by the OpenTelemetry collector into the Ladybug report format and make it available in the corresponding frontend application (https://opentelemetry.io/docs/collector/configuration/#exporters)
• Functionallity to forward collected Ladybug reports in OpenTelemetry format to the central OpenTelemetry collector (https://opentelemetry.io/docs/collector/configuration/#receivers)
• Export Ladybug reports in OpenTelemetry forward
• Import reports from OpenTelemetry forward

With those mechanisms in place, it would enable the user to host separate instances of Ladybug:

• The current implementation as we know, an individual instance which is bound to an application instance, reports shown here only show the messages processed in this specific instance.
• A 'global' instance which can be used to retrieve data from the central OpenTelemetry collector. This enables the Ladybug to display tracing/debugging data which is sourced from multiple applications across the application chain. Even by applications that are not built by the Frank Framework or applications which didnt implement Ladybug but do have an OpenTelemetry implementation!