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OpenTelemetry

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OpenTelemetry enhances monitoring and observability in Boomi API Gateway by providing a standardized way to capture telemetry data about your APIs' performance and behavior. The Gateway generates this data in a consistent format that you can integrate with third-party observability platforms for analysis and visualization.

Boomi API Gateway captures the following types of telemetry data:

  • Traces: Provide end-to-end visibility into the lifecycle of API requests by mapping the flow of each call through the Gateway. Each span corresponds to a unit of work (policy execution, request forwarding, and so on).

  • Logs: Export API Gateway service logs from all nodes to the OTel endpoint for easier troubleshooting.

  • Metrics: Report performance indicators such as CPU use, memory usage, JVM statistics, and so on.

The API Gateway supports independent endpoint routing to provide greater flexibility for organizations using specialized tools for different telemetry types. You can override individual endpoints to simultaneously deliver traces, metrics, and logs to different observability platforms, such as routing traces to Jaeger, metrics to Prometheus, and logs to Splunk.

While global OpenTelemetry settings configure Gateway-wide data delivery, Boomi API Management also supports dynamic, per-API tracing controls and a targeted Advanced tracing mode. These features allow platform engineers and API administrators to selectively enable, disable, or deeply diagnose tracing for specific APIs without needing to restart the API Gateway instance.

Global versus API-level tracing precedence

Understanding how global Gateway configurations interact with API-level settings is critical for managing system performance and observability costs:

  • Global Gateway tracing switch (master precedence): If you turn OpenTelemetry tracing OFF globally at the Gateway level, it acts as a hard override. The Gateway suppresses all API-level tracing configurations and emits no traces or policy spans for any API, regardless of individual API settings.
  • API-level overrides: When you turn OpenTelemetry tracing ON globally at the Gateway level, individual APIs can dynamically override the global default. Administrators can configure specific APIs to run standard tracing (the default), force tracing off, or enable high-fidelity verbose tracing.
  • Dynamic runtime updates: All updates made to API-level tracing modes or sub-toggles take effect instantly on the runtime request path without requiring an API Gateway restart.

Tracing modes reference

API-level tracing supports three distinct operational modes configured within individual API settings:

UI LabelBehavior & Operational Details
BasicForces tracing OFF for this specific API, overriding global settings. Suppresses all policy execution and streaming spans while preserving root server spans and downstream trace propagation headers.
IntermediateDefault state. Generates one span per policy in execution sequence, capturing per-policy execution timing and latency.
AdvancedEnables high-fidelity diagnostic tracing. Splits each policy span into dedicated request and response sub-spans enriched with configurable headers, policy configurations, and body previews. Runs as a time-limited troubleshooting session.
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