In this chapter, we took a high-level look at observability problems created by the new popular architectural styles, microservices and FaaS, and discussed why traditional monitoring tools are failing to fill this gap, whereas distributed tracing provides a unique way of getting both a macro and micro view of the system behavior when it executes individual requests.
I have also talked about my own experience and history with tracing, and why I wrote this book as a comprehensive guide to many engineers coming to the field of tracing.
In the next chapter, we are going to take a hands-on deep dive into tracing, by running a tracing backend and a microservices-based demo application. It will complement the claims made in this introduction with concrete examples of the capabilities of end-to-end tracing.