Why should I use Telemetry (Cinnamon) instead of Kamon?

Why should I use Telemetry (Cinnamon) instead of Kamon?

Telemetry (aka Cinnamon) is the industry’s most capable tool for the monitoring of Akka, Play and Lagom applications. While Cinnamon and Kamon share some common features such as actor mailbox metrics, dead letter message counts and fine-grained configuration, Cinnamon has numerous unique and valuable features:

  • Split Brain Resolver (SBR) events: SBR decisions, unreachable nodes, etc.
  • Akka Cluster events and metrics: leader changed, shard region delivered messages, etc.
  • Lagom circuit breaker metrics: state, latency, and throughput
  • Support for OpenTracing vendor-neutral APIs for distributed tracing
  • Per endpoint Akka HTTP/Play/Lagom metrics
  • Vizceral integration for visualization of nodes, actors and the messages flowing between them (experimental)
  • Akka Streams metrics
  • Akk Persistence instrumentation
The insights obtained through the analysis of this information can be invaluable for developers and operations when fixing bugs and fine-tuning performance.

As a Lightbend subscriber, you are fully licensed and entitled to add Cinnamon to your project. In addition to that, by using the Customer Portal to create support cases, you can interact directly with Cinnamon engineers for additional support, product feedback and new feature suggestions.

    • Related Articles

    • How to aggregate Cinnamon rates over time

      Cinnamon does not support this natively in part because neither of our underlying metric backends support that type of rate metric*. The Rate metric is for rates of occurrences, like how many times has this happened, and the Recorder is for measuring ...
    • How to monitor my Play application? Can I use Cinnamon?

      Yes! Starting in version 2.7 Cinnamon added support for monitoring Play 2.6+ applications. For more information, you can check out the announcement here.
    • Why can't I see Cinnamon metrics when running my Play application in development?

      A common cause for Cinnamon metrics not being reported in Play development is because Cinnamon does not currently support Play’s development mode*, which is the mode used by the Play server when started using the sbt run command. As a workaround, ...
    • What are the units for Cinnamon rates?

      The units will actually depend on the metric backend used. Rate is a general interface that just has a mark method. For the Coda Hale Metrics backend, the custom metrics Rate is backed by a Meter. Meters record rates in events per second. These ...
    • Split Brain Resolver throws java.lang.NoSuchMethodError

      This error happens when using SBR 1.1.4 in conjunction with Lightbend Telemetry (aka Cinnamon) 2.10.8.  The changes introduced in SBR, unfortunately, broke the instrumentation in Cinnamon. That has been corrected in Cinnamon version 2.10.9 and the ...