Summary

In this chapter, we learned how to use distributed tracing to understand how our microservices cooperate. We learned how to use Micrometer Tracing to collect trace information, and Zipkin to store and visualize the trace information.

We saw how adding Micrometer Tracing to microservices is affected by adding a couple of dependencies to the build files and setting up a few configuration parameters. Reactive microservices are currently not fully supported, but we learned how to work around the most important issues. If required, we can use the Observation API to create custom spans or add tags to all spans created by a microservice. We also saw how the Zipkin UI makes it very easy to identify which part of a complex workflow caused either an unexpectedly long response time or an error. Both synchronous and asynchronous workflows can be visualized with the Zipkin UI.

In the next chapter, we will learn about container orchestrators, specifically Kubernetes. We will learn...