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

Staying consistent with semantic conventions

One of the most important questions we’re yet to discuss is what information to add to telemetry signals to make them useful – this is where OpenTelemetry semantic conventions come into play.

Semantic conventions describe what information to collect for specific technologies, such as HTTP or gRPC calls, database operations, messaging scenarios, serverless environments, runtime metrics, resource attributes, and so on.

Semantic conventions are part of the OpenTelemetry specification and have been published in the specification repository at https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification. They apply to all instrumentations authored by the OpenTelemetry project.

Note

At the time of writing, semantic conventions are in an experimental status. The community is actively working on stabilization and the attributes I use in this book will likely be renamed or changed in other ways.

The goal of semantic...