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

Instrumenting with OpenTracing


Now that we have run the application and got a pretty-looking trace, it is time to get to the main point of this chapter and discuss how it was instrumented to achieve this. As we discussed earlier, the primary goal of the OpenTracing project is to provide an API that allows for the creation of open source instrumentation for other open source projects and frameworks. In the Tracing Talk application, we rely heavily on such open source instrumentation for Kafka, Redis, and the Spring framework, to the point that there is very little manual instrumentation in the code, and that small amount is only due to the relative immaturity of the respective instrumentation libraries, rather than a fundamental limitation. We also made this example completely agnostic to which tracing library we are using. Unlike Chapter 4, Instrumentation Basics with OpenTracing, where we had explicit code instantiating the Jaeger tracer, this time we are using the "tracer resolver" mechanism...