1.1.1 March 23 2021

1.1.0 January 25 2021

Akka.Cluster Metrics Phobos now automatically records the number of nodes of each MemberStatus and the reachability of those cluster members. This happens without any need for manual code on the part of the Phobos user.

We also now append the first akka.cluster.roles item as a tag to all exported metrics - which should make it easy to group metrics together by Akka.Cluster role type.

We've shipped a default Akka.Cluster + Phobos Grafana dashboard that gathers the default metrics that are collected via Prometheus that you can install to visualize this data inside your own applications:

https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/13775

Minor Changes:

  • Metrics - Capture exception types inside log events and actor crashes;
  • Bugfix: Capture correct message name when tracing message that caused actor to crash; and
  • Upgraded to Akka.NET v1.4.16.

1.0.5 December 07 2020

  • Upgraded Akka.Cluster.Tools from v1.4.11 to v1.4.12
  • Removed obsolete HOCON default configuration. SampleRate setting is obsolete at Phobos.Actor.Configuration.MonitoringSettings.
  • Fixed missing tags for akka.actor.created metrics counter

1.0.4 November 16 2020

1.0.3 October 12 2020

Added WrappedTracer type, designed to make it possible for OpenTracing.ITracer implementations which don't support custom IScopeManagers to play nicely with Phobos' ActorScopeManager, which makes correlation from ASP.NET Core (and other non-Akka.NET services) --> Akka.NET automatic and accurate.

The WrappedTracer gets invoked automatically via the extension method .WithScopeManager present on the TracerExtensions class:

public static void ConfigureDataDogTracing(IServiceCollection services)
{
    // Add DataDog Tracing
    services.AddSingleton<ITracer>(sp =>
    {
        return OpenTracingTracerFactory.CreateTracer().WithScopeManager(new ActorScopeManager());
    });
}

In this case, the DataDog OpenTracing.ITracer returned by this method will be nested inside a WrappedTracer, which will proxy all of the real underlying tracing calls down to DataDog's client - but Phobos' ActorScopeManager will be used to perform all of the correlation activities.

Speaking of DataDog, we've also added a DataDog branch to the Phobos Quickstart tutorial Github repository here: https://github.com/petabridge/Petabridge.Phobos.Web/blob/feature/datadog-integration/README.md#working-with-datadog

1.0.2 June 19 2020

  • Fixed bug that caused actor crashes when complex generic types were logged during tracing.
  • Fixed issue that caused Unhandled and DeadLetter messages to not be logged by tracing or metrics correctly.

1.0.1 June 19 2020

  • Uses the NoMetrics.Instance as the default metrics inside PhobosSetup when users don't explicitly set an IMetricsRoot.

1.0.0 June 18 2020

Phobos 1.0.0 is a major shift from Phobos v0.9, and you can read the full details about what's new in Phobos 1.0.0 here.

The short version:

  1. Programmatic Configuration - Most configuration is now done programmatically, through the use of the PhobosSetup class. Phobos no longer requires any additional driver packages beyond what you configure programmatically.
  2. Easily Correlate Data between Akka.NET, ASP.NET, Kafka, SignalR, RabbitMQ, and more.
  3. Replacing Phobos.Monitoring with App.Metrics - As of Phobos 1.0.0, we now use the popular .NET monitoring library App.Metrics to handle all of the underlying monitoring and reporting for Phobos. This means that the number of monitoring services Phobos supports just got a lot larger.
  4. Significantly Improved Signal / Noise Ratio - Phobos now produces signiciantly less noise that it used to, which makes it much easier for you to understand what's going on inside your system.
  5. Simplified Pricing Model - Phobos no longer has any per-node licensing - and we've significantly reduced the price. Learn more about Phobos' new price and modeling here.

We've also built a big, full-fledged example you can use to learn the ins and outs of Phobos instead a real Akka.NET + ASP.NET Core Kubernetes cluster.

0.8.0 March 11 2020

  • Upgraded all interfaces to Akka.NET v1.4.1

0.7.1 September 02 2019

  • Added support for tracing messages sent via Akka.Cluster.Tools.DistributedPubSub.

0.7.0 August 06 2019

  • Added support for tracking stashed and unstashed messages.
  • Added support for tracing /system actors correctly.
  • Can now trace sharded entity actors instantiated via DI.
  • Upgraded to Akka.NET v1.3.14.

Phobos.Tracing v0.6.0

  • Added Kafka Zipkin transport options.
  • Rolled back to Google.Protobuf v3.3.0.
  • Upgraded to Akka.NET v1.3.14.
  • Upgraded to Petabridge.Tracing.Zipkin v0.5.1.

Phobos.Monitoring v0.8.0

  • Added Phobos.Monitoring.Prometheus package. It's still a work in progress but it's now being actively supported.
  • Upgraded to Akka.NET v1.3.14.

0.6.0 September 27 2018

Phobos v0.6.0 is a feature release for Phobos which includes support for new tracing and monitoring integrations:

  • Tracing: Jaeger - we've added first party support for the popular open source Jaeger tracing engine, which is now available via the Phobos.Tracing.Jaeger NuGet package.
  • Tracing: Microsoft Application Insights - we've added OpenTracing-compatible tracing support for Microsoft Azure's managed Application Insights service via the Phobos.Tracing.ApplicationInsights package.
  • Monitoring: Microsoft Application Insights - in addition to adding tracing support for Application Insights, we've also added corresponding monitoring support via the Phobos.Monitoring.ApplicationInsights NuGet package.

All of these are now available and are ready for immediate use. Please click on the links above for more details on how each of these platforms work.

Minor Updates and Changes

  • Upgraded to Phobos.Tracing v0.5.1 and Phobos.Monitoring v0.7.0;
  • Phobos.Actor: fixed a bug that caused instrumented actors created via Akka.DI.Core's System.DI().Props<TActor> methods to fail at startup. This has been fixed.
  • Phobos.Actor.Cluster: all entity actors created via Akka.Cluster.Sharding are now automatically tracked just like any other /user actor.
  • Monitoring: Removing the Timing.Start() method from the Timing class as it created issues with denormalization under the hood.
  • Monitoring: Changed the IMonitor implementation such that all denormalization of metrics now occurs through there. This will make it significantly easier for developers building custom MetricsRecorder implementations for custom Phobos.Monitoring plugins to have all of their data denormalized into both node-specific and cluster-wide metrics in the first place.

0.5.1 August 17 2018

  • Exposed the PhobosSettings.For(ActorSystem) method so users can easily can access to the current PhobosSettings and the default PhobosActorSettings in order to easily customize Phobos configurations for specific actors using Props rather than just the akka.actor.deployment HOCON namespace.

0.5.0 August 09 2018

  • Upgraded to Phobos.Tracing v0.4.6 and Phobos.Monitoring v0.6.1;
  • Significantly improved processing speeds for actors when Phobos is not enabled;
  • Added the ability to filter incoming messages using both blacklisting and whitelisting systems during tracing;
  • Added ability to automatically capture actor crashes and spawns inside traces - these traces will not be recorded if there is no ActiveSpan available at the time either of these events occurs.
  • All metrics recorded inside any Phobos-enabled actor are now automatically correlated across all supported dimensions, as outlined here: https://phobos.petabridge.com/articles/monitoring/index.html#global-node-specific-class-specific-and-actor-specific-metrics

Phobos.Monitoring v0.6.0 Changes

  • Renamed MonitoringExtension to ActorMonitoring in order to make it more consistent with the ActorTracing APIs used by Phobos.Tracing.
  • Added overloads to IMonitor for passing in TimeSpan for recording all Timing operations.
  • Introduced the ActorMonitor, which can be acquired via an actor's Context.MonitorFor() extension method. The ActorMonitor automatically reports any metrics created using it using both the actor's ActorPath as well as its implementation type; when sampling is enabled both metrics will either be emitted at the same time or neither will.
  • Added the ability for any of the Metric objects, such as Gauge, Counter, or Timing, to support reporting gathered metrics under multiple names or aliases for denormalization purposes. When sampling is enabled, either all names will be included in the sample or none will.
  • Introduced the TimingScope mechansim, which can be used by Phobos users to automatically time the duration of an operation with a simple using block. Here's an example down below:
using (Monitor.StartTiming("foo")) // creates a TimingScope
{
    Task.Delay(100).Wait();
} // completes and records the timing once the scope is disposed here.

0.4.4 July 18 2018

  • Resolved an issue with /system tracing and monitoring causing some issues at startup when enabled. These have been resolved.
  • Upgraded to Phobos.Monitoring v0.5.6 and Phobos.Tracing v0.4.5.

0.4.3 July 16 2018

  • Added full support for sampling across all traces; all child spans will automatically be recorded if a parent span is present, but otherwise we will use probabilistic sampling if you set the phobos.tracing.sample-rate value to anything other than the default (1.0, which means a 100% sample rate.)
  • Fixed a bug with mailbox-monitoring where we weren't properly honoring the HOCON setting. This has been fixed.
  • Fixed an issue with tracing causing deserialization errors during sampling. This has been fixed.
  • Upgraded to v0.3.1 Petabridge.Tracing.Zipkin driver.

0.4.1 July 1 2018

  • Upgraded to OpenTracing v0.1.2 for all tracing components;
  • Upgraded to Akka.NET v1.3.8.

0.4.0 April 27 2018

First certified, production-ready release of Phobos.Actor and all of its counterparts.

Phobos v0.4.0 introduces the following changes:

  1. Automatic correlation of all DeadLetter, UnhandledMessage, and LogEvent (i.e. Debug et al) messages types to the current active ISpan when tracing is enabled for the actors involved in the production of those messages.
  2. Automatic monitoring of DeadLetter, UnhandledMessage, and LogEvent (i.e. Debug et al) occurrences per ActorSystem.
  3. Automatic monitoring of the total number of received messages, actor starts, actor stops, and actor restarts per ActorSystem.
  4. Full support for ActorSelection tracing both locally and over Akka.Remote and Akka.Cluster.
  5. Full support for OpenTracing.IScopeManager and OpenTracing.IScope inside all ITracer instances used by Phobos.Tracing.
  6. Intellisense support for all Phobos packages.
  7. And lots of other small changes.

Please report any issues you come across to our mailing list here: https://phobos.petabridge.com/