Introducing Sysdig Tracers: open source transaction tracing meets htop and strace

Sysdig Tracers are an innovative tool designed to provide lightweight, open-source transaction tracing that combines aspects of Zipkin-style tracing, strace-like data collection, and an htop-inspired interface. Positioned as a simplified Application Performance Management (APM) solution, Sysdig Tracers allow users to instrument and monitor various aspects of software execution, from methods and service calls to network requests and shell scripts, by using specially formatted text strings written to /dev/null. These tracers generate events that are integrated into the Sysdig event stream, allowing for detailed analysis and visualization of execution spans within a system. The tool is particularly useful for tracking application transaction times, system-level latencies, and other performance metrics, offering a cost-effective and language-independent alternative to traditional APM tools. By leveraging Sysdig's capabilities, users can capture, filter, and analyze tracer events, making it a versatile tool for both development and production environments, with future plans to expand its feature set to include integrations for common programming languages.