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

Why host your own?


As the creator and a maintainer of an open source tracing system, I would obviously have a conflict of interest if I were to advocate for everyone to run their own tracing backend. By no means would this be the right answer for all organizations. There are many reasons when it makes more sense to use a hosted solution; the complexity of operating yet another distributed system is one of the major reasons to look for commercial or freemium vendors that will take care of receiving, storing, and processing the traces for you. However, there are also benefits to operating a tracing backend by yourself, some of which I want to briefly mention here.

Customizations and integrations

Commercial offerings are often, by necessity, designed as general-purpose solutions, aimed at satisfying the needs of many different customers. Yet every organization is unique in its history and its needs, and sometimes an organization may need features that may not make sense to others, and therefore...