Tracing Executions

Understand how to trace executions of your CRON application.

Introduction

Briefly, tracing represents the journey of a single execution of your scheduler through an entire app stack. By tracing your executions, developers can identify what happened with a determined execution and also identify bottlenecks and focus on improving performance.

Athenna offers two ways to trace your schedulers executions: logging each execution and creating OpenTelemetry spans for them.

Logging executions

Athenna can log the CRON context every time one of your schedulers runs. This feature is disabled by default, to enable it set the logger.enabled option of your

Path.config('cron.ts')

./src/config/cron.ts

configuration file to true:

Path.config('cron.ts')

import { Env } from '@athenna/config'

export default {
  logger: {
    enabled: Env('LOG_CRON', true)
  }
}

Each execution will be logged using the cronjob channel of your

Path.config('logging.ts')

./src/config/logging.ts

configuration file:

Path.config('logging.ts')

export default {
  channels: {
    cronjob: {
      driver: 'console',
      formatter: 'json',
      level: 'trace'
    }
  }
}

tip

If the cronjob channel doesn't exist in your

Path.config('logging.ts')

./src/config/logging.ts

file, Athenna will use a vanilla logger with the exact same configuration as above.

Tracing with OpenTelemetry

If the @athenna/otel package is installed in your application, Athenna can run each execution of your schedulers inside an OpenTelemetry span and context. Check the CRON observability documentation to see how to enable it and how to share values across your executions using context bindings.

Disabling tracing

Since both features are disabled by default, to disable them you just need to set its options to false or remove them from your

Path.config('cron.ts')

./src/config/cron.ts

file:

Path.config('cron.ts')

export default {
  logger: {
    enabled: false
  },
  otel: {
    contextEnabled: false
  }
}

The OpenTelemetry integration will also be automatically disabled if the @athenna/otel package is not installed in your application. Check the CRON observability documentation for more details.