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...