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Instrumentation/Available Instrumentation

Akka Instrumentation Overview #

Kamon ships instrumentation modules for Akka, each addressing a different aspect of the toolkit:

Local Actor Systems #

This module is the foundation of all Akka-related instrumentation, including:

  • Metrics collection: Metrics for actor systems, actors, routers, dispatchers and actor groups. You must explicitly configure which components to track.
  • Message Tracing: Generates Spans for actor messages. You must explicitly configure which actors to trace.
  • Context Propagation: Make sure that Kamon’s Context gets propagated across actor messages in the local actor system.
  • Ask Pattern Timeout Warning: A utility that logs a warning with additional information when a usage of the Ask Pattern times out.

The following artifacts are published, pick the right one for your Akka version:

  • kamon-akka-2.4 for Akka 2.4.20+
  • kamon-akka-2.5 for Akka 2.5.8+

Dependency For Local Actor Systems #


libraryDependencies += "io.kamon" %% "kamon-akka-2.5" % "1.1.2"



    <dependency>
      <groupId>io.kamon</groupId>
      <artifactId>kamon-akka-2.5_2.13</artifactId>
      <version>1.1.2</version>
    </dependency>


implementation 'io.kamon:kamon-akka-2.5_2.13:1.1.2'

You must start your application with the instrumentation agent for this module to work properly.

Remoting and Cluster #

Provides instrumentation for remoting channels in Akka. Since Akka cluster builds on top of remoting, the metrics and context propagation features included with this module will also benefit cluster users.

  • Remoting Metrics Collection: Metrics for message serialization/deserialization time and message sizes for all incoming and outgoing messages to remote actor systems.
  • Context Propagation: Propagates Kamon’s Context to remote actor systems. This is specially important for supporting distributed tracing.

The following artifacts are published, pick the right one for your Akka version:

  • kamon-akka-remote-2.4 for Akka 2.4.20+
  • kamon-akka-remote-2.5 for Akka 2.5.8+

Dependency For Remoting and Cluster #


libraryDependencies += "io.kamon" %% "kamon-akka-remote-2.5" % "1.1.0"



    <dependency>
      <groupId>io.kamon</groupId>
      <artifactId>kamon-akka-remote-2.5_2.13</artifactId>
      <version>1.1.0</version>
    </dependency>


implementation 'io.kamon:kamon-akka-remote-2.5_2.13:1.1.0'

You must start your application with the instrumentation agent for this module to work properly.

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