Cloud-Native Microservices With Kubernetes - 2nd Edition

Key Takeaways

Observability without distributed tracing is blind. Logs and metrics leave some gaps that only tracing can fill. Distributed tracing is the deeper observability pillar that reveals the hidden problems inside your microservices. The most important points to remember about what you learned in this section are:

• Distributed tracing provides a way to track requests as they propagate through a distributed system, allowing you to see the entire journey of a request across multiple services.
• It helps identify performance bottlenecks, latency issues, and errors in complex microservices architectures.
• OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework that provides APIs, libraries, agents, and collector services to capture distributed traces, logs, and metrics from your applications. It's widely adopted as a standard for instrumentation.
• Jaeger is a popular open-source distributed tracing system that can be used as a backend to store and visualize traces collected by OpenTelemetry.