Cracking Performance Issues in Microservices with Distributed Tracing

Microservices architecture, now prevalent in modern product development, enables rapid advancement through independent services but poses significant challenges in monitoring due to its distributed nature. Traditional logs are insufficient for tracing issues across hundreds of services, leading to the rise of distributed tracing, which profiles and monitors applications to identify failures, performance issues, and service dependencies. Distributed tracing, gaining popularity with tools like Jaeger and OpenTelemetry, offers a structured method of gathering and visualizing data through spans, helping teams understand request execution and optimize service performance. The field has evolved from Google's Dapper, and the adoption rate has increased, as evidenced by DevOps surveys, with many organizations planning to implement it soon. Additionally, Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) are crucial in managing complex flows within microservices, emphasizing the need to monitor user journeys over individual services. Open source projects play a vital role in this ecosystem, with tools like OpenTelemetry providing standardized methods for data collection, further cementing distributed tracing as an essential tool for observability in microservices and distributed systems.