Mastering Distributed Tracing

Chapter 7. Tracing with Service Meshes

In previous chapters, we discussed multiple methods of extracting tracing data from applications, either by adding instrumentation directly to the application code, or enabling the instrumentation dynamically at runtime through configuration. I also mentioned agent-based instrumentation, often provided by commercial APM vendors, which works by injecting trace points externally into the customer's program, using techniques such as monkey-patching and bytecode manipulation. All these methods can be classified as white-box instrumentation, since they all require modification of the application's code, either explicitly ...