Logging and tracing using the ELK stack

Today, products and services are divided into multiple small parts and executed as separate processes or deployed as separate services, rather than as a monolithic system. An API call may make several other internal API calls. Therefore, you need distributed and centralized logging to trace a request that spans multiple web services. This tracing can be done using the trace identifier (traceId), which can also be referred to as a correlation identifier (correlationId). This identifier is a collection of characters that forms a unique string, which is populated and assigned to an API call that requires multiple inter-service calls. Then, the same trace identifier is propagated to subsequent API calls for tracking purposes.

Errors and issues are imminent in the production system. You need to carry out debugging to ascertain the root cause. One of the key tools associated with debugging is logs. Logs can also give you warnings related to the...