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
Other Books You May Enjoy
Leave a review - let other readers know what you think
15
Afterword
Index

Summary


Metrics, logs, and traces are often called the "three pillars of observability", a term that does not do justice to each tool individually, or in combination, and makes many software organizations inclined to check all three boxes, sometimes by using three different vendors, without getting any better observability for their systems.

In this chapter, we discussed how metrics and logs lack the investigative and debugging power when applied to distributed systems because in their standard forms, they are not aware of the distributed request context and cannot provide a narrative for a single execution. I showed how combining these tools with context propagation and tracing enhances their ability to explain system behavior.

I used a simple Hello application to demonstrate these integrations in practice and we applied techniques that we first discussed in Chapter 10, Distributed Context Propagation, such as using the OpenTracing baggage (a form of context propagation) to pass around fault...