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

Clock skew adjustment


Anyone working with distributed systems programming knows that there is no such thing as accurate time. Each computer has a hardware clock built in, but those clocks tend to drift, and even using synchronization protocols like NTP can only get the servers maybe within a millisecond of each other. Yet we have seen that end-to-end tracing instrumentation captures the timestamp with most tracing events. How can we trust those timestamps?

Clearly, we cannot trust the timestamps to be actually correct, but this is not what we often look for when we analyze distributed traces. It is more important that timestamps in the trace are correctly aligned relative to each other. When the timestamps are from the same process, such as the start of the server span and the extra info annotations in the following diagram, we can assume that their relative positions are correct. The timestamps from different processes on the same host are generally incomparable because even though they...