This is an article from DZone’s 2022 Performance and Site Reliability Trend Report.
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Distributed tracing, as the name suggests, is a method of tracking requests as it flows through distributed applications. Along with logs and metrics, distributed tracing makes up the three pillars of observability. While all three signals are important to determine the health of the overall system, distributed tracing has seen significant growth and adoption in recent years.
When we build a microservice architecture and the number of services keeps growing, we face the problem of debugging and tracing requests through our entire system. What happened when a user got a 500 error on his request? What service incorrectly processed his request? All these questions can be solved by the Distributed Tracing System. Let’s take Spring Cloud Sleuth as an example.
To trace a request through a distributed system, the concepts TraceID and SpanID are introduced. TraceID is generated when a request enters our system and remains unchanged throughout its path. SpanID changes as the request passes from one service to another. If necessary, it is possible to generate new spans within one service to distinguish business processes.
