Mainmatter Workshop: Telemetry for Rust APIs – you can't fix what you can't see

Duration & location

The workshop takes place over two afternoons on May 28th, and 29th, 14:00 to 18:00 CET each. That allows participants to use the mornings to exercise or keep up with work.

The workshop is run completely online and remote.

Number of participants

To ensure the highest quality, we accept up to 15 participants.

For whom?

This workshop is designed for developers who are operating Rust services in production-like environments, or are preparing to do so.

Prerequisites

We will send a detailed list of instructions for preparation, including the installation of tools, etc. Additionally, we will share a Github project with workshop materials. This information will be provided closer to the workshop date.

Workshop Contents

1. Structured logging (tracing): An introduction to the tracing instrumentation library, covering both how to instrument your code (capturing fields, log levels, macros) and how to process the resulting telemetry data in your application (subscriber configuration, logging levels, log filtering).
2. Error handling: We will cover Rust’s Error trait, with a focus on the information that can be retrieved and recorded in your logs; we will also spend some time on logging patterns (e.g. when should an error be logged?).
3. Panic handling: You should always manage to capture details about what went wrong, even if it’s due to an uncaught panic rather than an error. We will review panic hooks and integrate them into our tracing setup.
4. Metrics: Structured logs are important, but they don’t tell the full story. We will look at how to capture metric data using the metrics library, as a tool for designing alarms as well as troubleshooting faulty behaviour.

Workshop facilitator

Luca Palmieri builds technology products for a living and is Mainmatter's Principal Engineering Consultant. His current focus is on backend development, software architecture and the Rust programming language. He is the author of "Zero to Production in Rust" and Mainmatter's Rust expert.

About Mainmatter

Mainmatter is a consultancy that focuses on Rust on the backend: APIs, data pipelines and web solutions. We offer strategic advice, training, and team reinforcement. We also organize the EuroRust conference.