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

Tracing Network Calls

In this chapter, we’ll apply what we learned about tracing in Chapter 6, Tracing Your Code, to instrument client and server communication via gRPC.

We’ll start by instrumenting unary gRPC calls on the client and server according to OpenTelemetry semantic conventions. Then, we’ll switch to streaming and explore different ways to get observability for individual messages. We’ll see how to describe them with events or individual spans and learn how to propagate context within individual messages. Finally, we’ll see how to use our instrumentation to investigate issues.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to do the following:

  • Instrument network calls on the client and server following OpenTelemetry semantic conventions and propagate context over the wire
  • Instrument gRPC streaming calls according to your application needs
  • Apply telemetry to get insights into network call latency and failure rates and investigate...