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.
In modern microservices-based applications, it is difficult to get an overview of how requests are performing across multiple services, infrastructure, and protocols. As companies began moving to distributed systems, they realized they needed a way to track requests in their entirety for debugging applications. Distributed tracing is a technology that was born out of this need.
Distributed tracing has become critical for application performance monitoring in microservice-based architecture. Jaeger is a popular open-source tool used for distributed tracing. With distributed tracing, engineering teams get a central overview of how user requests perform across multiple services.
With microservices becoming popular, tracing is increasingly more important in debugging production software. In this post, we take you through a step by step guide on setting up Jaeger over Kubernetes with Cassandra storage.