Chapter 7. Tracing with Service Meshes
In previous chapters, we discussed multiple methods of extracting tracing data from applications, either by adding instrumentation directly to the application code, or enabling the instrumentation dynamically at runtime through configuration. I also mentioned agent-based instrumentation, often provided by commercial APM vendors, which works by injecting trace points externally into the customer's program, using techniques such as monkey-patching and bytecode manipulation. All these methods can be classified as white-box instrumentation, since they all require modification of the application's code, either explicitly or implicitly at runtime. In Chapter 3, Distributed Tracing Fundamentals, we also discussed black-box techniques that work purely by correlating externally observed telemetry, such as logs used by the Mystery Machine [1].
In this chapter, we will discuss and try in practice how service meshes, a relatively new phenomenon in the cloud-native...