Hi Subhanshu,

Thank you for the contribution!

The module looks good and will add value to the use cases you mentioned.

My concern is that `drools-opentelemetry` looks like a feature built
on top of the Drools engine, so it may not be appropriate to place it
at the top level of the `drools` repository. Maybe we could have an
umbrella directory like `drools-contrib` or `drools-experimental`.
Does anyone have thoughts?

Toshiya

On Wed, Feb 25, 2026 at 8:42 PM Francisco Javier Tirado Sarti
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hi,
> Nice addition.
> Although not completely related, I think it is worth mentioning that there
> is already some OpenTelemetry usage in the kogito-runtimes repository.
> Here
> <https://github.com/apache/incubator-kie-kogito-runtimes/tree/main/quarkus/addons/opentelemetry>
> node
> listeners are used to trace the progress of the Workflow.
> I do not think it will conflict with what you are planning to do (If I
> understood correctly, you are adding OpenTelemetry only to the rule engine)
> Also, since Quarkus's POM handles OpenTelemetry dependencies, we are good
> on that too.
>
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 25, 2026 at 12:37 AM Subhanshu Bansal <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
> > Hi Everyone,
> >
> > I have opened a PR to implement support for OpenTelemetry for Drools.
> >
> > PR: https://github.com/apache/incubator-kie-drools/pull/6595
> >
> > This is a separate module and why I used Open Telemetry specifically is
> > because it gives you production visibility into how your Drools rules are
> > actually behaving in a running system. Here’s what that means concretely
> > for this project:Distributed TracingWhen rules execute inside a
> > microservice, the TracingAgendaEventListener creates spans that connect to
> > your existing traces. If a REST request hits your service, triggers rule
> > evaluation, and then calls a downstream service, you get one unified trace
> > showing exactly which rules fired, how long each took, and what facts were
> > involved. Without this, Drools is a black box inside your trace — you see
> > the request enter and leave, but nothing about the decision logic in
> > between.Metrics for Production MonitoringThe MetricsAgendaEventListener
> > exposes counters and histograms that flow into whatever backend you already
> > use (Prometheus, Datadog, Grafana, etc.). This lets you:
> >
> >    - Alert when a rule suddenly fires 10x more than usual (possible data
> >    issue or regression)
> >    - Dashboard rule firing latency to catch performance degradations before
> >    users notice
> >    - Compare rule firing patterns across deployments (did the new rule
> >    version change behavior?)
> >
> > Why OpenTelemetry specifically (vs. the existing Micrometer in
> > drools-metric)The existing drools-metric module focuses on internal
> > node-level constraint evaluation metrics via Micrometer. OpenTelemetry adds
> > a different dimension with metrics and tracing.
> >
> > The key differentiator is correlation. When a customer complaint comes in,
> > an SRE can search traces by the request ID, see exactly which rules fired
> > during that request, how long each took, and what facts were inserted — all
> > without adding any logging or redeploying. That’s the operational benefit
> > that the existing drools-metric module doesn’t address.
> >
> > I am open to all the suggestions. Feel free to reach out.
> >
> > Thanks!
> >

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