In the previous article, we learned what distributed tracing is, why it is necessary, how to do tracing, encountered challenges with existing tracing tools, and finally discovered that there is a more mature option available for the industry to adopt in terms of telemetry and observability.
In this article, we will be trying to understand OpenTelemetry in more depth.
Have you heard about traces? Most likely, yes! Do you confuse it with auditing? Hope not. Today, we're going to talk about tracing, specifically “Distributed Tracing,” and do a deep dive into it. Once we’re familiar with distributed tracing, we will show you how to implement it with OpenTelemetry - a new-age observability framework.
Spans are fundamental building blocks of distributed tracing. A single trace in distributed tracing consists of a series of tagged time intervals known as spans. Spans represent a logical unit of work in completing a user request or transaction.
Jaeger is a popular open-source tool used for distributed tracing in a microservice architecture. In a microservice architecture, a user request or transaction can travel across hundreds of services before serving what a user wants. Distributed tracing helps to track the performance of a transaction across multiple services.
Setting up observability and robust monitoring for distributed systems is a challenging task. Engineering teams need access to different pieces of information to understand what's happening with their application. Is OpenTelemetry a step in the right direction for distributed tracing? Let's find out.
In this article, we will implement distributed tracing for a nodejs application based on microservices architecture. To implement distributed tracing, we will be using open-source solutions - SigNoz and OpenTelemetry, so you can easily follow the tutorial.
N+1 query problem is a problem in database retrieval where the related entities of an object are queried individually from a database, leading to O(n) queries where n is the number of related entities of the object.
Mouthful of words, I agree 🙂
Let’s take an example to illustrate what it means.
Modern digital organizations have rapidly adopted microservices-based architecture for their applications. Microservices-based apps have components designed around business capabilities serving a specific purpose. It enables smaller engineering teams to own specific services that lead to increased productivity.
There are standalone distributed tracing tools like Jaeger, and there are APM tools that do not provide distributed tracing capabilities. In this article, we will see how distributed tracing complements an APM tool for a holistic performance monitoring experience.
Microservices architecture allows technology companies to build application services around business capabilities. It enables rapid development and also boosts developer productivity. But it also introduces complexity. Troubleshooting and operating an internet-scale application based on microservices is hard. And that’s where distributed tracing comes into the picture.