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

Adding Custom Metrics

In the previous chapter, we looked into manual distributed tracing instrumentation, which should help us debug individual operations or analyze service usage with ad hoc queries. Here, we’ll talk about metrics. First, we’ll learn when to use them, understand cardinality requirements, and then see how traces and metrics complement each other. We’ll explore the metrics API’s evolution in .NET and then spend most of this chapter talking about OpenTelemetry metrics. We’ll cover instruments such as counters, gauges, and histograms, and learn about each of them in depth.

We will cover the following topics in the chapter:

  • The benefits, limitations, and evolution of metrics in .NET
  • How and when to use different counters
  • How to record and use gauges
  • How to record value distribution with histograms

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to pick the right instrument for each scenario and implement and...