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
Other Books You May Enjoy
Leave a review - let other readers know what you think
15
Afterword
Index

Chapter 6. Tracing Standards and Ecosystem

In the microservices-ruled world, end-to-end tracing is no longer a "nice-to-have" feature, but "table stakes" for understanding modern cloud-native applications. In Chapter 4, Instrumentation Basics with OpenTracing, we saw an example of what it takes to manually instrument a simple "Hello, world!" application for distributed tracing. If, after reading it, you were left with the impression, "oh, that is a lot of work," then it achieved one of its goals. Developing and deploying instrumentation in order to get high-quality tracing data is absolutely the largest, but not the only, challenge of rolling out a distributed tracing solution in an organization. In Chapter 13, Implementing Tracing in Large Organizations, we will review some practical techniques for making the process easier from an organizational point of view.

In this chapter, we will discuss:

  • Open source projects aiming to ease or eliminate the instrumentation challenge

  • Standards initiatives...