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 7 – extra credit


This exercise does not have any specific code examples or even recommendations. Instead, it's an invitation to go and explore the large amount of community-contributed instrumentation libraries listed in the OpenTracing Registry [5]. Check whether a framework you are using in your application is already supported there and give it a try. If it's not supported, maybe use the skills you acquired by reading this chapter to contribute a new module. Alternatively, if you know the developers of the framework, ask them to add OpenTracing instrumentation and enable tracing in their framework.

Another option to explore for "extra credit" is trying to use the same Hello application with a different implementation of OpenTracing. You can find OpenTracing-compatible libraries for Zipkin, and for other tracing systems [5], both free and commercial. The only places that need changing in the exercises are the InitTracer functions.