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 3. Distributed Tracing Fundamentals

Distributed tracing, also known as end-to-end or workflow-centric tracing, is a family of techniques that aim to capture the detailed execution of causally-related activities, performed by the components of a distributed system. Unlike the traditional code profilers or host-level tracing tools, such as dtrace [1], end-to-end tracing is primarily focused on profiling the individual executions cooperatively performed by many different processes, usually running on many different hosts, which is typical of modern, cloud-native, microservices-based applications.

In the previous chapter, we saw a tracing system in action from the end user perspective. In this chapter, we will discuss the basic underlying ideas of distributed tracing, various approaches that have been presented in the industry, academic works for implementing end-to-end tracing; the impact and trade-offs of the architectural decisions taken by different tracing systems on their capabilities...