Integrate Kafka Clients with Jaeger for Distributed Tracing and Monitoring

This post introduces the integration of Kafka clients with Jaeger for distributed tracing using OpenTelemetry. It details intrusive (decorated consumer/producer, interceptors) and non-intrusive (in-process Java agent, out-of-process sidecar/eBPF) tracing methods for Kafka. It then focuses on OpenTelemetry's instrumentation libraries, collector, exporters, and propagators, demonstrating a scenario involving GitHub source connector, ksqlDB, and Jaeger UI to visualize event flow and latency. It also discusses challenges with stateful stream processing and header propagation.