Distributed tracing has been gaining a lot of attention in the monitoring and observability space. In a recent survey, the number of DevOps practitioners reporting using distributed tracing tools in 2020 has risen by 38% since last year. The leading tool in that space is Jaeger, the popular open source project which was developed at Uber, and which has graduated the CNCF incubation in October 2019.

If you’ve migrated from a monolith to a microservice and cloud native architecture, you probably experienced the monitoring challenge: the dynamic and highly distributed nature of modern systems renders it impossible to keep track of the web of interconnecting services and of the flow of requests through that
web.

Distributed tracing provides the missing telemetry to understand the service dependencies in a microservice (or any highly distributed) system and identify critical paths and latency sources in the application. This talk will introduce basic concepts and terms such as code instrumentation, spans and sampling rates.  You will gain practical guidance on Jaeger, and how to effectively use it to monitor your system.