Distributed Tracing in Practice

Introduction: What Is Distributed Tracing?

If you’re reading this book, you may already have some idea what the words distributed tracing mean. You may also have no idea what they mean—for all we know, you’re simply a fan of bandicoots (the animal on the cover). We won’t judge, promise.

Either way, you’re reading this to gain some insight into what distributed tracing is, and how you can use it to understand the performance and operation of your microservices and other software. With that in mind, let’s start out with a simple definition.

Distributed tracing (also called distributed request tracing) is a type of correlated logging that helps you gain visibility into the operation of a distributed software system for use cases such as performance profiling, debugging in production, and root cause analysis of failures or other incidents. It gives you the ability to understand exactly what a particular individual service is doing as part of the whole, enabling you to ask and answer questions about the performance of your services and your distributed system as a whole.

That was easy—see you next book!

What’s that? Why’s everyone asking for a refund? Oh…

We’re being told that you need a little more than that. Well, let’s take a step back and talk about software, specifically distributed software, so that we can better understand the problems that distributed tracing solves.

Distributed Architectures and You

The art and science of developing, deploying, and operating software is constantly ...