Everything You wanted to Know About Distributed Tracing

In the age of microservices, understanding how applications are executing in a highly distributed environment can be complicated. Looking at log files only gives a snapshot of the whole story and looking at a single service in isolation simply does not give enough information. Each service is just one side of a bigger story. Distributed tracing has emerged as an invaluable technique that succeeds in summarizing all sides of the story into a shared timeline. Yet deploying it can be quite challenging, especially in the large scale, polyglot environments of modern companies that mix together many different technologies. During this session, we will take a look at patterns and means to implement Tracing for services. After introducing the basic concepts we will cover how the tracing model works, and how to safely use it in production to troubleshoot and diagnose issues.