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

Tracing Your Code

In the previous chapters, we talked about instrumentation libraries and learned how to use auto-collected telemetry to monitor and debug distributed systems. Auto-instrumentations, when available, provide necessary and reasonable coverage for network calls, but you may want to trace additional logical operations, I/Os, sockets, or other calls that don’t have shared instrumentation available.

This chapter provides an in-depth guide to manual tracing using the System.Diagnostics primitives or the OpenTelemetry API and explains the mechanism behind auto-instrumentation. We will cover the Activity properties and how to populate them and show you how to record events. We’ll then learn how to use links to represent complex relationships between spans. Finally, we’ll cover the testing aspects of instrumentation.

You’ll learn how to do the following:

  • Create activities using the .NET API or with the OpenTelemetry API shim
  • Use ambient...