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

Monitoring with runtime counters

So, we have correlated logs from the platform and services with which we can debug issues. But what about system health and performance? .NET and ASP.NET Core expose event counters that can give some insights into the overall system state.

We can collect counters with OpenTelemetry without running and managing dotnet-monitor. But if your metrics pipeline is broken (or if you don’t have one yet), you can attach dotnet-monitor to your process for ad hoc analysis.

dotnet-monitor listens to EventCounters reported by the .NET runtime and returns them on an HTTP endpoint in Prometheus exposition format.

Note

Prometheus is a metrics platform that scrapes and stores metrics. It supports multidimensional data and allows us to slice, dice, filter, and calculate derived metrics using PromQL.

We’re going to run our service as a set of Docker containers with dotnet-monitor running as a sidecar for the frontend and storage, and configure...