Opentelemetry: emit traces from Visual Cobol (Linux) to external collector?

Hi Tung,

We have added support for OpenTelemetry, for applications running under our Enterprise Server component on Linux, beginning with Visual COBOL V10.0.

The description in the product release notes is:

This release includes support for OpenTelemetry on UNIX platforms. OpenTelemetry provides observability of Enterprise Server applications by collecting telemetry data. You can configure OpenTelemetry to emit the information that you require and in a form that can be consumed by third-party monitoring software, such as Prometheus, Grafana, and Dynatrace. This can enable you to visualize processes and workflow performance and behavior.

Here is a link to the documentation of Visual COBOL DevHub 11.0:

Using OpenTelemetry

Hi Chris,

many thanks for your pointer. Meanwhile, I also found the same documentation  under “Visual COBOL 10.0 for Eclipse (UNIX)” as well.

We have stuck for many years to the traditional native compiled binaries, so we will need to investigate the migration from native binaries to the newer Enterprise Server setup first. With our rapidly team, this sounds like a significant step to digest first.  :-)

I’m wondering how hard that “modernization” is and what pitfalls we need to watch out for, but that is an entirely different topic.

Wondering about the CTF (Consolidated Tracing Facility) path: I have the impression this is still actively supported by Rocket Software, and maybe still works with native binaries instead of Enterprise Server (??), but I haven’t see any bridge from CTF to external OpenTelemetry collector. Building that last connection feels like a hassle as well.

https://docs.rocketsoftware.com/bundle/visualcoboleclipseux_ug_100/page/non1761216780760.html

Regards,

Tung

Hi Tung,

Yes, the CTF is supported for both native applications running without Enterprise Server and applications running under Enterprise Server and is a very useful tool for diagnosing problems at run-time without having to modify your source code or even recompile. 

The interface to OpenTelemetry is thru a bridge from CTF but it currently is only available for use with Enterprise Server. Enterprise Server is used to run applications as web services or with the Enterprise Developer product, to emulate a mainframe environment in which to run mainframe applications.

Modernizing your code to split it into a frontend component and a backend component that runs under Enterprise Server, can be a daunting task. We do have some tools built-into our IDEs to do code slicing and take a section of code and turn it into a web service but still, depending on the size of your application this can be a very time-consuming task.