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

The architecture


Now that we have seen what the HotROD application does, we may want to know how it is architected. After all, maybe all those servers we saw in the logs are just for show, and the whole application is simply a JavaScript frontend. Rather than asking someone for a design document, wouldn't it be great if our monitoring tools could build the architecture diagram automatically, by observing the interactions between the services? That's exactly what distributed tracing systems like Jaeger can do. That request for a car we executed earlier has provided Jaeger with enough data to connect the dots.

Let's go to the Dependencies page in the Jaeger UI. At first, we will see a tiny diagram titled Force Directed Graph, but we can ignore it, as that particular view is really designed for showing architectures that contain hundreds or even thousands of microservices. Instead, click on the DAG tab (Directed Acyclic Graph), which shows an easier-to-read graph. The graph layout is non-deterministic...