Distributed Tracing in Practice

Chapter 10. Are We There Yet? The Past and Present

If you’ve read this book, then let us offer our congratulations! We have officially covered the full range of technical topics, and you are ready to put distributed tracing to good use in your own applications.

We’re now going to turn our gaze toward the future, and discuss some new challenges that distributed tracing might be able to solve in the future (possibly with some tweaks to the way things work under the hood).

We’ll also look back at how some of the concepts described in this book came to be. They certainly didn’t materialize out of thin air! Rather, distributed tracing as we know it is the result of a gradual evolution—a process that is not yet over. What lessons can we learn from the journey so far? And in what ways might distributed tracing continue to evolve?

Of course, we cannot predict the future with total certainty. We can, however, point out places where careful decision-making today might make your life substantially easier down the line. We’ve already emphasized this sort of judicious decision-making throughout the book, such as keeping instrumentation implementation-agnostic, and pushing instrumentation to the framework level where possible. For the future, it’s all about making ourselves robust to what might happen. What kinds of new use cases might distributed tracing solve? How might we use or repurpose the constituent pieces of distributed tracing?

For many of these questions, we can find possible answers ...