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

Building the culture


It is great to see that the culture of building applications that include observability features is gaining traction in the industry. Back in the days when I was working on derivatives trading systems for an investment bank, our version of application health monitoring was a trader calling on the phone (a landline, mind you) and complaining that they couldn't book or price their trades. Today, systems that automatically expose metrics to monitor their health are commonplace, while systems that support distributed tracing are still rare. Similarly, many engineers are familiar with tools like Prometheus and Grafana, and less familiar with distributed tracing tools. There are some things we can do to change this culture.

Explaining the value

It is hard to sell someone on a product that they do not need. This is not the case with end-to-end tracing, which has a clear value proposition, but people just don't know about it. At Uber, we have given a number of internal talks showing...