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 9 – Best Practices

  1. HTTP traces, potentially combined with some application-specific attributes, can help answer most questions about tiny RESTful service behavior. We can aggregate metrics from traces using OpenTelemetry Collector or at query time on the backend. We still need metrics for resource utilization though. The right questions to ask here are how much this solution costs us and whether there is the potential to reduce costs with sampling and how much we must spend to keep alerts running based on queries over traces. If it’s a lot, then we should look into adding metrics. So, the answer is – yes, but it can be more cost-efficient to add other signals.
  2. In an application under heavy load, every bug will happen again and again. No matter how small of a sampling rate we choose, we’ll record at least some occurrences of such an issue. A high sampling rate would likely have some performance impact, but more importantly, it’ll be...