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

Using instrumentations for popular libraries

In the previous chapter, we saw how to enable tracing for the .NET platform, ASP.NET Core, and Entity Framework to cover the basics, but anyone can create instrumentation for a popular library and share it with the community. Also, with tracing and metrics primitives being part of .NET and OpenTelemetry to collect data in a vendor-agnostic way, libraries can add native instrumentation.

There are multiple terms that describe different kinds of instrumentations:

  • Auto-instrumentation sometimes implies that instrumentation can be enabled without any modification of application code, but is sometimes used to describe any shared instrumentation that is easy to enable.
  • Instrumentation library means that you can enable instrumentation by installing the corresponding NuGet package and configuring it with a few lines of code at startup time.
  • Native instrumentation implies that instrumentation code is a part of the library, so no...