On April 28, 2026, we released version 2.0.3 of our Kieker observability framework for application performance monitoring and dynamic software analysis.

We release all Kieker libraries via Maven repositories. Information on repositories and downloads are available at https://kieker-monitoring.net/download/ and the source code release is available at https://github.com/kieker-monitoring/kieker/releases/tag/2.0.3.

• Kieker uses Java 17 by default, and support Java 23
• We disabled logging timestamp in the default configuration
• We incorporated the new Maven publishing model
• Minor fixes and additions to the readthedocs documentation
• Delete empty tool runtime-analysis
• Remove unused lombok
• Replace jacoco Jenkins plugin by new plugin
• Update to AspectJ 1.9.23 at runtime
• Update gradle wrapper to 8.14.4
• Update to ByteBuddy 1.18.8
• Update AspectJ to 1.9.25.1
• Dependency updates

We are pleased to share our new publication “Benchmarking the Overhead of Distributed Tracing Agents” (https://doi.org/10.1145/3777884.3797004, preprint) in the proceedings of 17th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (homepage). We used MooBench to measure and compare the overhead of distributed tracing agents, and Kieker’s Java agent has shown 1.38 us (Binary file) and 1.55 us (Binary TCP), which incur the minimum overhead among the compared tracing agents. Our root cause analysis using flamegraph has revealed which method calls are responsible to the overhead.