Mastering Distributed Tracing

Building the culture

It is great to see that the culture of building applications that include observability features is gaining traction in the industry. Back in the days when I was working on derivatives trading systems for an investment bank, our version of application health monitoring was a trader calling on the phone (a landline, mind you) and complaining that they couldn't book or price their trades. Today, systems that automatically expose metrics to monitor their health are commonplace, while systems that support distributed tracing are still rare. Similarly, many engineers are familiar with tools like Prometheus and Grafana, and less familiar with distributed tracing tools. There are some things we can do to change this culture.

Explaining ...