Mastering Distributed Tracing

Exercise 5 – using baggage

In the previous exercise, we implemented a distributed context propagation mechanism in our microservices. It is easy to see that neither in-process nor inter-process context propagation mechanisms are very specific to distributed tracing metadata: they are generic enough to pass other types of metadata throughout the call graph of a distributed execution. The OpenTracing authors recognized that fact and defined another general-purpose container for arbitrary metadata called "baggage." The term was originally coined by Prof. Rodrigo Fonseca, one of the authors of the X-Trace system. The OpenTracing baggage is an arbitrary collection of key/value pairs that are defined and used by the application itself. In Chapter 10 ...