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

Enriching and filtering telemetry

Traces and metrics coming from auto-instrumentation describe the technical side of an operation. While we can always add more spans with custom context (and we’ll learn how to do it in Chapter 6, Tracing Your Code), it could be more practical to add custom context to auto-collected telemetry.

Application-specific context is necessary to track usage and contains essential information that helps to detect and investigate issues.

For example, if we take our meme service, it would be very helpful to have the meme name and size on spans. With this, we’d be able to find the most popular memes, correlate meme upload and download requests, plan capacity, make cache optimizations, or reason about partitioning.

The easiest way to add a meme name is via the Activity.SetTag method. For example, we can the following code on the Meme page:

Meme.cshtml.cs

public async Task<IActionResult> OnGet([FromQuery] string
  name...