Distributed tracing with Kubernetes
In a microservice-based system, every request may travel between multiple microservices calling each other, wait in queues, and trigger serverless functions. To debug and troubleshoot such systems, you need to be able to keep track of requests and follow them along their path.
Distributed tracing provides several capabilities that allow the developers and operators to understand their distributed systems:
- Distributed transaction monitoring
- Performance and latency tracking
- Root cause analysis
- Service dependency analysis
- Distributed context propagation
Distributed tracing often requires the participation of the applications and services instrumenting endpoints. Since the microservices world is polyglot, multiple programming languages may be used. It makes sense to use a shared distributed tracing specification and framework that supports many programming languages. Enter OpenTelemetry.
