Everything You Wanted to Know About Distributed Tracing

Explore the world of distributed tracing in this 39-minute conference talk from Strange Loop. Delve into the challenges of understanding application execution in microservices environments and discover how distributed tracing provides a comprehensive view of complex systems. Learn about tracing patterns, implementation strategies, and their application in large-scale, polyglot environments. Gain insights into the tracing model, its safe use in production for troubleshooting, and diagnostic techniques. Examine the evolution of monitoring tools, the components of a trace, context propagation, and the benefits of OpenTelemetry. Understand the potential of distributed tracing in identifying service performance, analyzing request flows, and overcoming implementation challenges. Presented by Hungai Kevin Amuhinda, a Developer Support Engineer at Lightbend with extensive experience in software engineering and open-source contributions.

Introduction
Dont take everything literal
A bit of history
Traditional monitoring tools
What is distributed tracing
What is a trace
Whats inside a trace
Context Propagation
Tags Logs
What can tracing help me
What services did I request faster
What occurred in each service for given requests
Why isnt everyone using it
Lack of education
Different implementations
OpenTelemetry
What is OpenTelemetry
Backwards Compatibility
Instrumentation
How to get involved
middleware
Example
Benefits