Introducing Phobos: Enterprise DevOps Suite for Akka.NET
Zero-code Actor Monitoring and Cross-Cluster Request Tracing
2 minutes to readToday it’s my pleasure to announce the production-ready release of Phobos, an enterprise DevOps suite for Akka.NET developers.
The initial release of Phobos is primarily aimed at solving the following problems:
- Instrumenting and monitoring activity from actors inside large Akka.NET applications and exporting it to common, off-the-shelf monitoring tools used by .NET enterprises;
- Implementing OpenTracing protocols behind the scenes and over the network stack of Akka.NET, so we can provide end-to-end distributed tracing for Akka.NET actors; and
- Doing all of the above automatically without any instrumentation code or setup of any kind. Phobos can be installed into any existing Akka.NET application and capture all of this data with as little as 5 lines of HOCON configuration.
I’d encourage you to watch the “Introduction to Phobos: Enterprise DevOps for Akka.NET” video we put together which explains this in more detail. It’s only about 5 minutes long.
Integration with Third Party Monitoring and Tracing Services
Phobos is designed to act primarily as instrumentation for your Akka.NET applications; it ships all of the metrics and trace data it records to off-the-shelf monitoring and tracing products. This includes a variety of open source and proprietary tools chosen by our customers and users. We know how hard it can be to introduce new tools inside large enterprise environments, so our goal is to be able to support whatever you and your organization currently use.
And if you’ve never used something like Zipkin or StatsD, we’ve collected some docker-compose
scripts you can use to test drive those technologies (with or without Phobos) here.
Trying and Using Phobos
Phobos has been in the works for about a year and we’ve...