Lesson 3.6: Observability & operations

Difficulty: Intermediate | Duration: 12 min | Prerequisites: Lesson 3.5

Overview

Run Bowire like a production service: emit traces and metrics, watch plugin health, back up state, and disable misbehaving plugins.

Telemetry (OpenTelemetry)

Off by default — laptop installs stay quiet. Opt in:

bowire --telemetry --url http://localhost:5101

Bowire emits traces + Bowire-domain metrics through the canonical Kuestenlogik.Bowire Meter + ActivitySource:

  • bowire.invoke.count / bowire.invoke.duration
  • bowire.discover.count
  • bowire.plugin.load
  • bowire.mock.requests

Endpoint, headers and protocol come from the standard OTLP env vars:

export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://collector:4317
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL=grpc

On shared multi-tenant installs (GDPR / HIPAA / SOX), drop the high-cardinality service + method dimensions:

bowire --telemetry --telemetry-strip-method-labels

Plugin health & disable

  • Every installed plugin exposes a health signal; the workbench's sidebar surfaces a badge, and the plugin lifecycle (load / unload / restart / reset-storage — Unit 5) is scriptable.
  • Skip a misbehaving protocol plugin at startup: bowire --disable-plugin grpc --disable-plugin signalr (repeat or comma-separate). Mirror for auto-discovered CLI subcommands with --disable-cli-command.
  • Update checks are opt-in (--update-check) — never phone home by default.

Backup

Workspace state lives under ~/.bowire (recordings, environments, collections, flows) and, per-workspace, under ~/.bowire/workspaces/<id>/. Back that tree up; a .bww export bundles a workspace for transport. In containers, mount it as a volume so state survives restarts.

Key Takeaways

  1. --telemetry is opt-in; metrics/traces flow through the Kuestenlogik.Bowire Meter/ActivitySource to any OTLP collector via OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_*.
  2. --telemetry-strip-method-labels for shared installs that can't keep per-method cardinality.
  3. --disable-plugin isolates a bad plugin; update checks + telemetry never run unless you opt in.
  4. Back up ~/.bowire (and per-workspace dirs); .bww bundles a workspace.

What's Next

Continue: → Lesson 3.7: Workspace hygiene

Reference