New Blog Post: Your Critical Legacy App is a Black Box? Let's Change That in 5 Minutes!

[luke6Lh43]

Title of the blog post:

Your Critical Legacy App is a Black Box? Let's Change That in 5 Minutes!

Short description and outline of blog post:

This blog post demonstrates how to gain crucial visibility into "black box" legacy applications using OpenTelemetry, without requiring any code changes. It outlines a practical approach to de-risk operations and gather data for future modernization efforts by instrumenting existing systems with minimal effort.

Outline:

Introduction: The common challenge of critical, un-observable legacy applications and the need for immediate visibility.
OpenTelemetry: Modern Observability for Legacy Code: How OpenTelemetry, typically associated with cloud-native, offers a powerful solution for legacy systems.
Simulated Legacy Application: Introduction of a sample C application that starts a JVM to simulate a common legacy pattern.
Stage 1: Basic Health Monitoring: Steps to configure the OpenTelemetry Java Agent via environment variables to collect vital signs like CPU, memory, and garbage collection metrics.
Stage 2: Performance Metrics: Further configuration to measure specific business logic (e.g., transaction processing time and throughput) using the OpenTelemetry Java Agent.
Summary: Emphasizing the strategic value of even limited visibility for legacy applications, enabling data-driven decisions and building confidence for modernization.

Technologies used in this blog post:

OpenTelemetry, Java, C, Prometheus, Grafana

Name of a SIG, which is related to this blog post:

Java: SDK + Instrumentation

Name of a sponsor (maintainer or approver) from this SIG, who will help to review that PR:

TBD