Monitoring, Tracing, and Distributed Logging

Applications developed nowadays tend to be running inside Docker containers or as a serverless application stack. Traditionally, applications were built as a monolithic entity—one process running on a server. All logs were stored on a disk. It made it easy to get to the right information quickly. To diagnose a problem with your application, you had to log in to a server and search through logs or stack traces to get to the bottom of the problem. But when you run your application inside a Kubernetes cluster in multiple containers that are executed on different servers, things get complicated.

This also makes it very difficult to store logs, let alone view them. In fact, while running applications inside a container, it’s not advisable to save any files inside it. Oftentimes, we run those containers in a read-only filesystem. This is understandable as you should treat a running container as an ephemeral identity that can be...