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

Exercise 1 – the Hello application


In the first exercise, we are going to run a simple, single-process "Hello" application, and review its source code, so that we can later instrument it for distributed tracing. The application is implemented as a web service, which we can access by sending it HTTP requests like this:

$ curl http://localhost:8080/sayHello/John
Hello, John!

$ curl http://localhost:8080/sayHello/Margo
Hello, Margo!

The application has some creepy big brother tendencies, however, by occasionally volunteering additional knowledge about the person:

$ curl http://localhost:8080/sayHello/Vector
Hello, Vector! Committing crimes with both direction and magnitude!

$ curl http://localhost:8080/sayHello/Nefario
Hello, Dr. Nefario! Why ... why are you so old?

It looks up the information in the MySQL database that we created and seeded earlier. In the later exercises, we will extend this application to run several microservices.

Hello application in Go

The working directory for all Go...