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Showing posts with the label Distributed Tracing

Tracing Is Not “Just Logging”!

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“ I already have enough logging, tracing is just redundant ”  —  #CowboyDeveloper   Logging works — oh yes it does — but only up to a point. The moment you start dealing with interactions that span systems and services all hell breaks loose.  Causality  becomes increasingly hard to track down ( which request caused this response? ), and “ before-after ” relationships are just a PITA. With tracing, you can — trivially — isolate the service and the relevant span, allowing you to drill into the behavior of your system without worrying about other concurrent requests cluttering your analysis. (And no, don’t get started with timestamps. These are distributed systems we are talking about!) Enter  OpenTracing , with which you can track the journey taken by the request as it bounces through your increasingly elaborate service. The general idea started with the  Dapper  project at Google, which inspired the OSS  Zipkin , and has ended with  it be...