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

Chapter 1 – Observability Needs of Modern Applications

  1. You can think about a span as a structured event with a strict but extensible schema, allowing you to track any interesting operation. Spans have trace context that describes the relationships between them. They also have a name, start time, end time, status, and a property bag, with attributes to represent operation details.

Complex and distributed operations need multiple spans that describe at least each incoming and outgoing request. A group of such correlated spans that share the same trace-id is called a trace.

  1. Spans (also known as Activities in .NET) are created by many libraries and applications. To enable correlation, we need to propagate context within the process and between processes.

In .NET, we use Activity.Current to propagate context within the process. This is a current span that flows with an execution context in synchronous or asynchronous calls. Whenever a new activity is started...