In the second part of the book, we reviewed various techniques for instrumenting our applications for end-to-end tracing and getting the tracing data out. This next part is all about what we can do with that data, as well as the tracing infrastructure in general.
We have already seen some glimpses of what is possible in Chapter 2, Take Tracing for a HotROD Ride, when we ran the HotROD demo application. In this chapter, we will do a more thorough review of the benefits provided by end-to-end tracing, and ways of using the tracing data to help engineers with day-to-day tasks. Some of the ideas presented here are theoretical, meaning that while they are feasible, not all of them are implemented in the existing tracing systems because there is so much to do when you start exploring the possibilities of end-to-end tracing. I hope that you can use some of these ideas as inspiration for what to do with the data generated by your own tracing infrastructure.