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 2. Take Tracing for a HotROD Ride

A picture is worth a thousand words. So far, we have only talked about distributed tracing in the abstract terms. In this chapter, we are going to look at concrete examples of the diagnostic and troubleshooting tools provided by a tracing system. We are going to use Jaeger (pronounced \\), an open source distributed tracing system, originally created by Uber Technologies [1] and now hosted with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation [2].

The chapter will:

  • Introduce HotROD, an example application provided by the Jaeger project, which is built with microservices and instrumented with the OpenTracing API (we will discuss OpenTracing in detail in Chapter 4, Instrumentation Basics with OpenTracing)

  • Use Jaeger's user interface to understand the architecture and the data flow of the HotROD application

  • Compare standard logging output of the application with contextual logging capabilities of distributed tracing

  • Investigate and attempt to fix the root causes of...