Observability Needs of Modern Applications
With the increasing complexity of distributed systems, we need better tools to build and operate our applications. Distributed tracing is one such technique that allows you to collect structured and correlated telemetry with minimum effort and enables observability vendors to build powerful analytics and automation.
In this chapter, we’ll explore common observability challenges and see how distributed tracing brings observability to our systems where logs and counters can’t. We’ll see how correlation and causation along with structured and consistent telemetry help answer arbitrary questions about the system and mitigate issues faster.
Here’s what you will learn:
- An overview of monitoring techniques using counters, logs, and events
- Core concepts of distributed tracing – the span and its structure
- Context propagation standards
- How to generate meaningful and consistent telemetry
- How to use distributed tracing along with metrics and logs for performance analysis and debugging
By the end of this chapter, you will become familiar with the core concepts and building blocks of distributed tracing, which you will be able to use along with other telemetry signals to debug functional issues and investigate performance issues in distributed applications.
