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

Instrumenting Brownfield Applications

When building brand-new services and systems, it’s easy to achieve a basic level of observability with distributed traces, metrics, and logs using OpenTelemetry instrumentation libraries.

However, we don’t usually create applications from scratch – instead, we evolve existing systems that include services in different stages of their life, varying from experimental to legacy ones that are too risky to change.

Such systems normally have some monitoring solutions in place, with custom correlation formats, telemetry schemas, logs and metrics management systems, dashboards, alerts, as well as documentation and processes around these tools.

In this chapter, we’ll explore instrumentation options for such heterogeneous systems, which are frequently referred to as brownfield. First, we’ll discuss instrumentation options for legacy parts of the system and then look deeper into context propagation and interoperating...