ISTIO stack enough? Can we do research on this/what’s missing

[durandom]

Is the #1 stack sufficient for initial projects?

[objectiser]

Currently Istio reports it's tracing data directly to a backend system, Jaeger being the default.

This may be good as an initial environment - as it would be possible for researchers to query the trace data from either Jaeger's query service, directly from the storage, or from a Kafka stream - depending upon how Jaeger is configured.

The downside is that this trace data would be in a Jaeger specific format.

As a future step we could provide additional instructions to configure OpenTelemetry collectors within this environment - this would enable research focused "processors" to be added to a custom OpenTelemetry Collector pipeline, and kafka stream based processing - but based on a "standard" (i.e. vendor neutral) trace data format.