Debugger in Kong Konnect

Are you spending too much time trying to track down failing requests or figure out performance issues within your Kong API Gateway? In this quick demo, we show you how to use Konnect's Debugger to save hours of debugging time by rapidly finding the root cause of latency and other issues.

You'll learn how Debugger allows you to set up deep tracing sessions for your Kong data planes, collecting OpenTelemetry-compatible traces across the entire request and response lifecycle. We will walk you through a real-world scenario where we diagnose a spike in latency for a specific service.

We cover:

➡️ How to configure sampling rules to capture all traffic or narrow in on specific errors, like 503s.

➡️ How to analyze the visualized trace data to immediately identify a bottleneck—in this case, a custom plugin causing a 300ms slowdown.

➡️ How to drill down into individual spans and their attributes for even deeper analysis.

This tutorial is perfect for administrators and developers looking to master Kong performance tuning, troubleshoot API latency, and gain deeper visibility into their API gateway traffic.