Practical Monitoring

Distributed tracing is a methodology and toolchain for monitoring the complex interactions inherent in a microservice architecture. Popularized by the Google Dapper paper and first implemented outside of Google with Zipkin, distributed tracing is becoming an integral component of the monitoring toolset for teams running microservice architectures. How it works is straightforward: for every request that comes in, “tag” it with a unique request ID. This request ID stays with the request and resulting requests throughout its life, allowing you to see what services a request touches and how much time is spent in each service. One important distinction of tracing versus metrics is that tracing is more concerned with individual requests than the aggregate (though it can also be used for that).