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Radar Set Up

Overview​

With Multiplayer’s System Auto-Documentation functionality (Radar) you can automatically discover, track, and detect drift in your system architecture, dependencies and APIs by directly connecting to your infrastructure.

New to Multiplayer​

If you’re new to Multiplayer we recommend following this 2-minute set up:

  • Create a workspace, project, and team
  • Visualize your system architecture with a platform (import an existing diagram image or manually add your platform components)
  • Invite your team

For optimal results with Radar, we also recommend:

New to OpenTelemetry​

What is OpenTelemetry​

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is an observability framework and toolkit designed to create and manage telemetry data such as traces, metrics, and logs. It’s a vendor- and tool-agnostic, open source Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project, born out of the need to standardize how to instrument code and send telemetry data to an observability backend.

Get Started with OpenTelemetry​

Instrumenting OTel in your application requires five minutes. Here are the steps:

  • Import the OpenTelemetry API and SDK
  • Configure the OpenTelemetry API
  • Configure the OpenTelemetry SDK
  • Create Telemetry Data

OTel provides language specific “getting started” guides for C++, .NET, Erlang/Elixir, Go, Java, JavaScript / Typescript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, Swift, etc.

How the Multiplayer OpenTelemetry integration works​

Multiplayer Radar leverages the OpenTelemetry Collector, a proxy that receives, processes, and exports telemetry data to receive the traces data you export.

We store raw OTel traces in ClickHouse. After processing (i.e. extracting the component name, environments, dependencies, etc.), data is stored in a different database in ClickHouse.

Set up Radar​

If you’re new to Multiplayer or OpenTelemetry, be sure to follow those steps first. 👆

To set up Radar follow these steps:

  • Open your project
  • In the left-side menu, open “Radar”
  • Click “Set up Radar”
  • Customize your set up in the Radar dialog

Select your environment​

  • When selecting “Any” environment Radar will automatically detect the existing environments and collect data from them. This is a good option if you just want to try Radar and see what type of information it can display.
  • To select a specific environment from which you want Radar to pull information, you first need to add it in “Environments” on the left-side menu. Once you’ve added your desired environment(s), you can continue with the Radar set up.
  • If you want to set up a specific OTel token per environment, click “Add Environment”.

Add environment variables with the OTel token​

Your approach to implementing the Multiplayer OTel integration will be slightly different depending on how you use OTel.

Using OTel for a single observability backend (Multiplayer)

If you’ll be using OTel to send telemetry data to a single observability backend (Multiplayer), add these two environment variables:

OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS="Authorization={{Multiplayer_token}}

  • OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_ENDPOINT - OTel Docs

OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_ENDPOINT=https://api.multiplayer.app/v1/traces

Using OTel for multiple observability backends

If you’ll be using OTel to send telemetry data to multiple observability backends, you would need to follow these steps.

Auto-Merge​

This functionality allows you automatically merge new or missing information about components, environments, dependencies, and APIs, to a specific platform within a specific design branch.

Enable Auto-Merge

If you enable auto-merge, you will be prompted to select where changes should automatically be applied.

  • Select the “branch”. We recommend selecting a design branch so that you may review any changes with your team before committing them to the main branch. If you’re certain of the changes you can select “main” directly.
  • Select the “platform”.
  • Select your “Auto-Create” preferences for newly detected components. When this option is enabled, Radar will automatically create new components that don’t currently existing in your Multiplayer project under that name or alias. You can leave this option disabled and manually review newly detected components and create them one by one or in bulk.

Keep Auto-Merge Disabled

If you decide to keep auto-merge disabled, you will need to:

  • Complete the Radar set up
  • Change the selected platform in the Radar filter options. If you have a single platform in your project, it will be selected by default.
  • Manually merge each detected change, one by one.

This gives you more control and ensures the opportunity to review each change before merging it.

Confirm Your Set Up​

Once you click “Confirm”, we will proceed with the Multiplayer OTel integration and start pulling traces from your system for components, environments, dependencies, and APIs.

Please note that if you close the set up window before finishing the set up, new OTel tokens will be generated when you re-open it.

Next Steps​

You did it! What’s next?