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 counters

Counter and UpDownCounter represent additive values – values that it makes sense to sum up. For example, the sum of incoming request counts with different HTTP methods makes sense, but the sum of CPU utilization across different cores does not.

On the instrumentation side, the only difference between Counter and UpDownCounter is that the former increases monotonically (or stays the same), while the latter can decrease. For example, the number of open and closed connections should be represented by Counter, while the number of active connections should be represented by UpDownCounter.

Both kinds of counters can be synchronous and asynchronous:

  • Synchronous counters report a delta of value when change happens. For example, once we successfully initiate a new connection, we can increment counters for both open and active connections. Once we’ve finished terminating a connection, we decrement the number of active connections only.
  • Asynchronous...