Monitor GORM performance with OpenTelemetry
GORM is an ORM library for dealing with relational databases. It is developed on the top of database/sql package.
This article will teach you how to monitor GORM performance using OpenTelemetry observability framework.
What is OpenTelemetry?
OpenTelemetry is a vendor-neutral standard that allows you to collect and export traces, logs, and metrics.
OpenTelemetry is a community-driven open source project that offers several components:
OpenTelemetry API is a programming interface that you can use to instrument code and collect telemetry data.
OpenTelemetry SDK is the official implementation of OpenTelemetry API that processes and exports collected telemetry to backends.
OpenTelemetry Collector is a proxy between your application and a backend. It receives telemetry data, transforms and exports it to backends that can store it permanently. Collector can also act as an agent that pulls telemetry data from monitored systems, for example, Redis or host metrics.
OpenTelemetry API and SDK are available for most programming languages and allows to send telemetry data to any tracing tool of your choice.
Installation
To install GORM OpenTelemetry instrumentation:
go get github.com/uptrace/opentelemetry-go-extra/otelgorm
Usage
To instrument GORM, you need to install the plugin provided by otelgorm:
import (
"github.com/uptrace/opentelemetry-go-extra/otelgorm"
"gorm.io/driver/sqlite"
"gorm.io/gorm"
)
db, err := gorm.Open(sqlite.Open("file::memory:?cache=shared"), &gorm.Config{})
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
if err := db.Use(otelgorm.NewPlugin()); err != nil {
panic(err)
}
And then use db.WithContext(ctx) to propagate the active span via context:
var num int
if err := db.WithContext(ctx).Raw("SELECT 42").Scan(&num).Error; err != nil {
panic(err)
}
What is Uptrace?
Uptrace is an open source and blazingly fast distributed tracing tool powered by OpenTelemetry and ClickHouse. It allows you to identify and fix bugs in production faster knowing what conditions lead to which errors.
You can get started with Uptrace by downloading a DEB/RPM package or a pre-compiled Go binary.
What's next?
Next, instrument more operations, for example, database queries, errors, and logs. You can also learn about OpenTelemetry Go Tracing API to create your own instrumentations.
Popular instrumentations:
See also:
