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

Know your audience


Just like many projects care about different aspects of tracing, different groups of people are their target audience:

  • Tracing system authors care about recording, federating, and correlating transactions, and about the projects attempting to standardize data formats for trace data and for metadata.

  • Tool users, for example, DevOps, SREs, and application developers, generally only care that the tool works and helps them to analyze transactions. They are not involved in most projects around the standardization efforts.

  • Data recorders, which often, but not always, include tracing system authors, care about recording transactions and work on tools that may include tracing libraries. For example, the OpenCensus project is focused on data recording, but it is explicitly agnostic to the actual tracing backend that receives the data. It is not maintained by the same people who maintain the tracing backends.

  • Application developers care about instrumentation APIs that help them to describe...