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

Exercise 5 – using baggage


In the previous exercise, we implemented a distributed context propagation mechanism in our microservices. It is easy to see that neither in-process nor inter-process context propagation mechanisms are very specific to distributed tracing metadata: they are generic enough to pass other types of metadata throughout the call graph of a distributed execution. The OpenTracing authors recognized that fact and defined another general-purpose container for arbitrary metadata called "baggage." The term was originally coined by Prof. Rodrigo Fonseca, one of the authors of the X-Trace system. The OpenTracing baggage is an arbitrary collection of key/value pairs that are defined and used by the application itself. In Chapter 10, Distributed Context Propagation, we will discuss various uses of this mechanism. In this exercise, we want to try it out in the Hello application.

One of the biggest advantages of baggage is that it can be used to pass data through the call graph without...