In the grand tapestry of software engineering, our journey often winds through labyrinthine layers of application logic. Here, bugs play a compelling game of hide-and-seek, and features dance in an unpredictable ballet. During these instances of fervent exploration, we find ourselves longing for a reliable compass—a secret weapon—to help us decipher the riddles that lie ahead. Cue execution tags, our luminous lighthouse cutting through the dense fog of complexity.

At Lumigo, we heavily depend on a set of tests to deploy code changes fast. For every pull request opened, we bootstrap our whole application backend and run a set of async parallel checks mimicking users’ use cases. We call them integration tests. These integration tests are how we ensure: Recently, we changed our old “traditional log traversing” of integration tests into *amazing* OpenTelemetry traces graphs.

Technology is a fast-moving commodity. Trends, thoughts, techniques, and tools evolve rapidly in the software technology space. This rapid change is particularly felt in the software the engineers in the cloud-native space make use of to build, deploy, and operate their applications. One particular area where we see rapid evolution in the past few years/months is Observability.

As developers we understand the critical role teamwork and collaboration play in solving complex problems. Often, it’s that second set of eyes that uncovers an additional issue or sheds light on the root cause of a stubborn bug. Effective collaboration becomes a critical factor in determining a team’s success or failure, especially when debugging or troubleshooting problematic issues within complex applications.

This post is part of an ongoing series about troubleshooting common issues with microservice-based applications. Read the previous one on intermittent failure. Queues are an essential component of many applications, enabling asynchronous processing of tasks and messages. However, queues can become a bottleneck if they don’t drain fast enough, causing delays, increasing costs, and reducing the overall reliability of the system.

KubeCon Amsterdam was an incredible gathering of like-minded professionals, bringing together devops, software engineers, vendors, and cloud technology enthusiasts from around the world. This year’s event was the biggest KubeCon + CloudNativeCon ever, with a sold-out attendee list of 10,000 strong. The sheer scale of the event was a testament to the growing popularity of cloud native technology and the vibrant community that supports it.

In your lifetime as a frontend developer that works with React, you must have come across several issues with debugging a containerized React application. I bet you can relate, you’re certainly not alone. Containerization has become an integral part of best practices for software development teams that want to create, test and deploy applications quickly and efficiently. However, despite its advantages, it also comes with new challenges for debugging and troubleshooting applications.

Kubernetes is the container orchestration platform of choice for many teams. In our ongoing efforts to bring the magic experience of Lumigo’s serverless capabilities to the world of containerized applications, we are delighted to share with you the Lumigo Kubernetes operator, a best-in-class operator to automatically trace your applications running on Kubernetes.