Mtracer Documentation

Welcome to the documentation for Mtracer, a CLI tool designed to create and execute system tests within a distributed system by collecting the generated traces in the OpenTelemetry format. This documentation provides everything you need to understand the usage, core concepts, and architecture of Mtracer.

What is Mtracer?

Mtracer is a command-line tool that allows developers to create system tests for distributed systems, collecting and analyzing the traces generated by applications.

Mtracer aims to start a trace through a trigger (such as HTTP or gRPC) and collect it via an observability backend (such as Jaeger, OpenObserve, etc.).
It is therefore the developer’s responsibility to ensure that all traces are sent to the observability backend and to configure Mtracer so it can collect them correctly.

Once you have defined how to start and collect the traces, the developer can perform various checks to verify that the traces meet the expectations.

Additionally, before each test, you can define commands to prepare the environment and clean it up upon completion.

Finally, it is crucial to note that Mtracer only supports the analysis of traces in the OTel format; therefore, if you wish to use an observability backend that does not natively support this format, or if the traces are published in a different format, you must first convert them to the OTel format.