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

Using OpenTelemetry schemas and tools

It does not really matter how we document custom semantic conventions. The goal is to have a consistent and specific convention that’s easy to read and follow. Let’s see how the OpenTelemetry semantic conventions schema may help with this.

Semantic conventions schema

So far, when we have talked about semantic conventions, we have referred to Markdown files such as https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification/blob/main/specification/trace/semantic_conventions/http.md. These files are the source of truth, but here, we’re going to take a look at the implementation details behind them.

The tables describing the attributes in these files are usually auto-generated. Attributes are defined in YAML files that follow OpenTelemetry’s semantic convention schema.

YAML files could be shared across different semantic conventions and signals and then consistently written to all Markdown files with a script...