Chapter 20. Distributed Computing

Question 1

What is distributed tracing?

Answer 1

• part of the methods to achieve full observability in microservice-systems

Question 2

What is a trace?

Answer 2

• represents the details about a transaction
• like how much time it took to call a specifig function
• a trace is referred to by the directed acyclic graph (DAG) of spans
• each span can be referred to as a timed operation between contiguous segments of work
• often does not give timing information and difficult when parallelism is involved

Question 3

What is OpenTelemetry?

Answer 3

• open source incubating project of CNCF
• offers consistent, expressive, vendor-neutral APIs

Question 4

What does OpenTelemetry do?

Answer 4

• collect tracing spans and then forward them to different tracers
• then used to monitor and troubleshoot microservices-based applications

Question 5

Name a few of the by OpenTelemetry supported traces?

Answer 5

• Jaeger
• ServiceNow Cloud Observability
• Elastic APM
• Aria by VMware

Question 6

What is Jaeger and what can it be used for?

Answer 6

• open source tracer
  Used for:
• distributed content propagation
• distributed transaction monitoring
• Root cause analysis
• Service dependency analysis
• Performance and latency optimization