Practical Monitoring

Distributed tracing is far-and-away the most challenging and time-consuming monitoring technique to implement properly, not to mention only being useful for a small segment of the industry. Distributed tracing is not for the faint of heart or the understaffed-and-overworked engineering team. If you’ve already got all the metrics and logs you want, but still find yourself struggling to understand inter-service performance and troubleshooting in a distributed architecture, then distributed tracing might be for you (and the same goes for those of you with significant serverless infrastructures). Otherwise, effectively instrumenting your apps with metrics and logs is going to result in much better (and quicker!) outcomes.