Get started with distributed tracing and Grafana Tempo using foobar, a demo written in Python

In the blog post, Daniel González Lopes, a Site Reliability Engineer at k6.io, introduces foobar, a Python-based demo application designed to facilitate the understanding and implementation of distributed tracing using Grafana Tempo. Distributed tracing, crucial for microservice architectures, involves tracking requests across services, which can be complex to set up. The foobar demo consists of two services, foo and bar, both instrumented with OpenTelemetry and capable of exporting traces to a Grafana Tempo backend. The post provides a step-by-step guide on setting up the demo using Docker, verifying its functionality with HTTP requests, and using k6, an open-source load-testing tool, to conduct smoke tests. Unexpected issues arise during testing, revealing the bar service's intentional random failures, which are traced and diagnosed using Grafana Tempo. The post concludes by encouraging readers to explore more about distributed tracing, k6, and Grafana Tempo through available resources and tutorials.