What is Distributed Tracing?
Distributed tracing is a monitoring process that tracks the progress of application requests as they traverse through distributed systems or microservices. It captures timing and contextual information to offer insights into the flow of requests, performance bottlenecks, and dependencies. This helps with troubleshooting and optimizing complex, distributed applications.
How does Distributed Tracing work?
Since microservices operate on distributed backends, tracing the entire path of a request can be challenging. Distributed tracing helps in this regard by tracking and providing insights into the journey of a request. It gathers and summarizes information about a user's interactions during the transaction.
Distributed tracing ensures the well-being of your application and enhances the overall user experience. Developers can use the compiled traces to identify and address issues such as bugs, errors, or significant delays.
Tracing data in distributed tracing typically consists of a sequence of spans. Each span represents a specific operation within a request and includes information such as the start time, end time, duration, and any relevant metadata. Spans are organized in a hierarchical structure, allowing developers to understand the relationship between different operations and how they contribute to the overall request flow.
Read about the difference between Distributed tracing and logging here