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 legacy services

The word legacy has a negative connotation in software development, implying something out of date and not exciting to work on. In this section, we will focus on a different aspect and define a legacy service as something that mostly successfully does its job but no longer evolves. Such services may still receive security updates or fixes for critical issues, but they don’t get new features, refactoring, or optimizations.

Maintaining such a service requires a different set of skills and fewer people than the evolving one, so the context of a specific system can easily get lost, especially after the team that was developing it moved on and now works on something else.

As a result, changing such components is very risky, even when it comes to updating runtime or dependency versions. Any modification might wake up dormant issues, slightly change performance, causing new race conditions or deadlocks. The main problem here is that with limited...