Book Image

Mastering Distributed Tracing

By : Yuri Shkuro
Book Image

Mastering Distributed Tracing

By: Yuri Shkuro

Overview of this book

Mastering Distributed Tracing will equip you to operate and enhance your own tracing infrastructure. Through practical exercises and code examples, you will learn how end-to-end tracing can be used as a powerful application performance management and comprehension tool. The rise of Internet-scale companies, like Google and Amazon, ushered in a new era of distributed systems operating on thousands of nodes across multiple data centers. Microservices increased that complexity, often exponentially. It is harder to debug these systems, track down failures, detect bottlenecks, or even simply understand what is going on. Distributed tracing focuses on solving these problems for complex distributed systems. Today, tracing standards have developed and we have much faster systems, making instrumentation less intrusive and data more valuable. Yuri Shkuro, the creator of Jaeger, a popular open-source distributed tracing system, delivers end-to-end coverage of the field in Mastering Distributed Tracing. Review the history and theoretical foundations of tracing; solve the data gathering problem through code instrumentation, with open standards like OpenTracing, W3C Trace Context, and OpenCensus; and discuss the benefits and applications of a distributed tracing infrastructure for understanding, and profiling, complex systems.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Mastering Distributed Tracing
Contributors
Preface
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15
Afterword
Index

Anatomy of tracing deployment and interoperability


As I alluded to earlier, standardization on the instrumentation API is not the only aspect of a successful rollout of a tracing solution in an organization. Consider the following imaginary application in Company X (Figure 6.3), where all microservices are instrumented with the OpenTracing API and use Jaeger libraries to collect traces in a single installation of the Jaeger backend.

Assuming that this is the complete architecture and the microservices do not communicate with any external systems (which is actually not realistic, at least for the Billing component, which usually needs to make calls to the external payment processor), there are no interoperability issues in this deployment that would prevent the collection of complete traces covering all the components of the application.

Figure 6.3: Imaginary application deployed in the cloud or on premises, instrumented with OpenTracing and collecting all traces in a single installation of...