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

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...