Distributed Tracing: A Full Guide
The rise of microservices has enabled users to create distributed applications that consist of modular services rather than a single functional unit. This modularity makes testing and deployment easier while preventing a single point of failure with the application.
While applications begin to scale and distribute their resources amongst multiple cloud-native services, tracing a single transaction becomes tedious and nearly impossible. Hence, developers need to apply distributed tracing techniques.
Distributed tracing allows a single transaction to be tracked across the front end to the backend services while providing visibility into the systems’ behavior.
How Distributed Tracing Works
The distributed tracing process operates on a fundamental concept of being able to trace every transaction through multiple distributed components of the application. To achieve this visibility, distributed tracing technology uses unique identifiers, namely the Trace ID, to tag each transaction. The system then puts together each trace from the various components of the application by using this unique identifier, thus building a timeline of the transaction.