Today 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:

1. 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;
2. 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
3. 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 had customers using it in production since April, but starting today it’s available for users who request a free 90-day evaluation of Phobos or purchase an Enterprise Subscription from Petabridge.

If you’d like to see what Phobos can do, we have a couple more videos showing off its monitoring and tracing capabilities respectively:

• “Phobos Akka.NET Monitoring with StatsD”
• “Phobos Akka.NET Tracing with Zipkin”

You can view the setup instructions for Phobos here, but long story short: Phobos targets .NET Standard 2.0 and will work with .NET 4.6.1 or later and .NET Core 2.0+.

We’d encourage you to request an evaluation or at the very least, request a Phobos demo from our team. And please sign up for our mailing list on the form below if you’re not already on it - that way we can keep you updated on the latest integrations, developments, and more.

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