Book Image

Modern Distributed Tracing in .NET

By : Liudmila Molkova
Book Image

Modern Distributed Tracing in .NET

By: Liudmila Molkova

Overview of this book

As distributed systems become more complex and dynamic, their observability needs to grow to aid the development of holistic solutions for performance or usage analysis and debugging. Distributed tracing brings structure, correlation, causation, and consistency to your telemetry, thus allowing you to answer arbitrary questions about your system and creating a foundation for observability vendors to build visualizations and analytics. Modern Distributed Tracing in .NET is your comprehensive guide to observability that focuses on tracing and performance analysis using a combination of telemetry signals and diagnostic tools. You'll begin by learning how to instrument your apps automatically as well as manually in a vendor-neutral way. Next, you’ll explore how to produce useful traces and metrics for typical cloud patterns and get insights into your system and investigate functional, configurational, and performance issues. The book is filled with instrumentation examples that help you grasp how to enrich auto-generated telemetry or produce your own to get the level of detail your system needs, along with controlling your costs with sampling, aggregation, and verbosity. By the end of this book, you'll be ready to adopt and leverage tracing and other observability signals and tools and tailor them to your needs as your system evolves.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Part 1: Introducing Distributed Tracing
6
Part 2: Instrumenting .NET Applications
11
Part 3: Observability for Common Cloud Scenarios
16
Part 4: Implementing Distributed Tracing in Your Organization

Writing Structured and Correlated Logs

Distributed tracing is a great tool to describe and correlate operations, but sometimes, we need to record things such as callbacks and startup configurations, or conditionally write debug information. In this chapter, we’re going to explore logs – the oldest and most popular telemetry signal that can describe anything.

First, we’ll talk about logging use cases and discover different APIs available in .NET, and then we’ll focus on ILogger – a common logging façade. We’ll learn how to use it efficiently to write structured events. We’ll see how to export logs with OpenTelemetry and write rich queries over them. Finally, we’ll explore log sampling and cost-saving strategies.

In this chapter, you’ll learn the following:

  • When to write logs and which .NET API to use
  • How to write logs with the Microsoft.Extentions.Logging.ILogger class
  • How to capture and export...