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

Summary


In this chapter, we talked about tracing instrumentation. We discussed common tasks that need to be addressed by the instrumentation, from simple annotations to in-process context propagation, to using inject/extract trace points to transfer distributed context across processes.

We took a brief detour and looked at using the baggage API for passing additional metadata alongside the distributed call graph.

We finished with a review of using off-the-shelf open source instrumentation for popular libraries, which can be applied with minimal changes to your application, from a few lines of code to literally zero changes. Best of all, all the instrumentation we reviewed was completely vendor-agnostic. We used it with Jaeger tracers, but they can be easily swapped for any other OpenTracing-compatible tracers.

In the next chapter, we will look at a more advanced case of instrumentation involving applications with asynchronous behavior: either internal-using futures or external-using messaging...