Hands-On Software Engineering with Golang

Tracing requests through distributed systems

In a world where you might have distributed systems with hundreds or thousands of microservices running, request tracing is an invaluable tool for figuring out bottlenecks, understanding the dependencies between individual services, and figuring out the root cause of issues that affect production systems.

The idea behind tracing is to tag an incoming (usually external) request with a unique identifier and keep track of it as it propagates through the system, hopping from one microservice to the next until it eventually exits the system.

The concept of a distributed tracing system is definitely not new. In fact, systems such as Google's Dapper ^[17] and Twitter's Zipkin ^[16] have been around for ...