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 2 – Native Monitoring in .NET

  1. Use Activity.Current?.Id on the page. For example, like this: <p>traceparent: <code>@System.Diagnostics.Activity.Current?.Id</code></p>.
  2. If we have dotnet-monitor running as a sidecar, we can connect to its instance corresponding to the problematic service instance, check the metrics and logs, and create dumps. We could even configure dotnet-monitor to trigger a dump collection based on certain events or resource consumption thresholds.

If we don’t have dotnet-monitor, but can access service instances, we can install dotnet-monitor there and get diagnostics information from the running process.

If instances are healthy, but the problem is somewhere inside the telemetry pipeline, troubleshooting steps would depend on the tools we use. For example, with Jaeger we can check logs; the Prometheus UI shows connectivity with targets; the OpenTelemetry collector provides logs and metrics for self...