Since most applications today are distributed in some fashion, monitoring their health and performance requires a new approach. Enter distributed tracing, a method of profiling and monitoring distributed applications--particularly those that use microservice architectures. There's just one problem: distributed tracing can be hard. But it doesn't have to be.

With this guide, you'll learn what distributed tracing is and how to use it to understand the performance and operation of your software. Key players at LightStep and other organizations walk you through instrumenting your code for tracing, collecting the data that your instrumentation produces, and turning it into useful operational insights. If you want to implement distributed tracing, this book tells you what you need to know.You'll learn:

The pieces of a distributed tracing deployment: instrumentation, data collection, and analysisBest practices for instrumentation: methods for generating trace data from your servicesHow to deal with (or avoid) overhead using sampling and other techniquesHow to use distributed tracing to improve baseline performance and to mitigate regressions quicklyWhere distributed tracing is headed in the future
Most applications today are distributed in some fashion. Monitoring the health and performance of these distributed architectures requires a new approach. Enter distributed tracing, a method of profiling and monitoring applications--especially those that use microservice architectures. There's just one problem: distributed tracing can be hard. But it doesn't have to be.With this practical guide, you'll learn what distributed tracing is and how to use it to understand the performance and operation of your software. Key players at Lightstep walk you through instrumenting your code for tracing, collecting the data that your instrumentation produces, and turning it into useful, operational insights. If you want to start implementing distributed tracing, this book tells you what you need to know.You'll learn: The pieces of a distributed tracing deployment: Instrumentation, data collection, and delivering valueBest practices for instrumentation (the methods for generating trace data from your service)How to deal with or avoid overhead, costs, and samplingHow to work with spans (the building blocks of request-based distributed traces) and choose span characteristics that lead to valuable tracesWhere distributed tracing is headed in the future
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