Distributed Tracing in Practice (20 minutes)

GOTO Amsterdam 2019

Completing a transition to a microservices based architecture makes every software engineer feel good. You can be proud of requests spanning multiple individual services, each with isolated single responsibility. Exactly as you dreamed it would be.

In the course of this transition however, you also created several new problems. Among these is a whole new level of complexity related to understanding the behavior of the application when troubleshooting a problem. If you have ever wrestled with pinpointing the exact root cause during a post-mortem, this talk is for you.

I will show you how capturing the runtime transparency of the distributed and dynamic architecture is possible. Moreover, I will cover both simple and advanced examples about how taking this route gives you an objective and evidence-based ability to zoom in to the problem.

After attending the talk you will understand how distributed tracing will help your team during incident response and post-mortems.

What will the audience learn from this talk?
Topics/Concepts covered in this talk include:

• What are distributed traces
• Different ways to add distributed tracing to your production services
• How the distributed traces expose the runtime architecture of your microservices in production.
• Examples of how a distributed trace highlights a problem
• Advanced examples of how distributed traces map root causes to real user impact

Prerequisite attendee experience level:
Level 300