Tracing with Ballerina
Traces are one of the important pillars of observability. This approach is important, especially in a distributed cloud system, where the requests go through different servers. Tracking a single message is complex just by using logs in a distributed system. OpenTelemetry is one of the popular tracing standards used in the industry. We will use the Jaeger tracing tool, which supports OpenTelemetry implementation, to collect and analyze traces as examples in this section.
Understanding the OpenTelemetry standard
OpenTelemetry is an open source observability framework that we can use to observe cloud native systems with traces. Traces can be used to track how a request flows through the system over different services. In this section, let's understand multiple terms used in tracing.
Span is the logical unit of work. A span has an operation life cycle with the starting time and ending time. A trace is an acyclic graph of spans with references. A trace...