The Role of Distributed Tracing in Quick Problem Solving
November 07, 2019

Ranjani
Site24x7

Share this

Microservices have become the go-to architectural standard in modern distributed systems. According to a recent report by Market Research Future, the industry shift towards adopting microservices is growing at 17 percent annually. Considering how microservices enable rapid application prototyping and faster deployments by reducing dependencies between individual components and services, this isn't all that surprising.

This independence of individual components is achieved by implementing proper interfaces via APIs to ensure that the system functions holistically. While there are plenty of tools and techniques to architect, manage, and automate the deployment of such distributed systems, issues during troubleshooting still happen at the individual service level, thereby prolonging the time taken to resolve an outage. 

The Challenges

Troubleshooting is always taxing, but microservices make it even more cumbersome, as developers have to correlate logs, metrics, and other diagnostic information from multiple lines of services. The higher the number of services in the system, the more complex diagnosis is.


In the unfortunate event of an outage, the microservices environment poses two main challenges: the primary one is fixing the issue and bringing services back online, which, by itself, is a tedious and time-consuming process that involves correlating large amounts of service-level data and coordinating with various tools. But the far greater challenge is narrowing down the problematic service among the myriad of interconnected ones. 

This is where distributed tracing comes into play. This mechanism enables DevOps teams to pinpoint the problem by skimming through the entire system for issues instead of tracing within the boundary of a service.

Causation and Not Just Correlation

Distributed tracing enables IT teams to visualize the flow of transactions across services written in multiple languages hosted across multiple data centers and application frameworks. This gives quick insight into anomalous behaviors and performance bottlenecks, and makes it easy even for a novice to understand the intricacies of the system.

In short, distributed tracing saves a lot of overhead in DevOps by presenting both a bird's-eye view of the system and the capability to zero in on the root cause of an issue.


The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is working on a standard that bridges the gap in providing a unified solution for distributed tracing. Very soon, distributed tracing will be an inevitable part in monitoring microservices.

The Road Ahead

Looking at the bigger picture, analyzing the massive sets of distributed traces would equip IT teams with more information than they usually get from mere troubleshooting. You can actually identify application behavior in various scenarios and derive actionable insights by studying these traces.

Soon, distributed tracing will not be considered as a mere problem solving tool; instead, it will take on an indispensable role in operational decision-making.

Ranjani is a Product Analyst at Site24x7
Share this

The Latest

March 28, 2023

This blog presents the case for a radical new approach to basic information technology (IT) education. This conclusion is based on a study of courses and other forms of IT education which purport to cover IT "fundamentals" ...

March 27, 2023

To achieve maximum availability, IT leaders must employ domain-agnostic solutions that identify and escalate issues across all telemetry points. These technologies, which we refer to as Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations, create convergence — in other words, they provide IT and DevOps teams with the full picture of event management and downtime ...

March 23, 2023

APMdigest and leading IT research firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) are partnering to bring you the EMA-APMdigest Podcast, a new podcast focused on the latest technologies impacting IT Operations. In Episode 2 - Part 1 Pete Goldin, Editor and Publisher of APMdigest, discusses Network Observability with Shamus McGillicuddy, Vice President of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA ...

March 22, 2023

CIOs have stepped into the role of digital leader and strategic advisor, according to the 2023 Global CIO Survey from Logicalis ...

March 21, 2023

Synthetic monitoring is crucial to deploy code with confidence as catching bugs with E2E tests on staging is becoming increasingly difficult. It isn't trivial to provide realistic staging systems, especially because today's apps are intertwined with many third-party APIs ...

March 20, 2023

Recent EMA field research found that ServiceOps is either an active effort or a formal initiative in 78% of the organizations represented by a global panel of 400+ IT leaders. It is relatively early but gaining momentum across industries and organizations of all sizes globally ...

March 16, 2023

Managing availability and performance within SAP environments has long been a challenge for IT teams. But as IT environments grow more complex and dynamic, and the speed of innovation in almost every industry continues to accelerate, this situation is becoming a whole lot worse ...

March 15, 2023

Harnessing the power of network-derived intelligence and insights is critical in detecting today's increasingly sophisticated security threats across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure, according to a new research study from IDC ...

March 14, 2023

Recent research suggests that many organizations are paying for more software than they need. If organizations are looking to reduce IT spend, leaders should take a closer look at the tools being offered to employees, as not all software is essential ...

March 13, 2023

Organizations are challenged by tool sprawl and data source overload, according to the Grafana Labs Observability Survey 2023, with 52% of respondents reporting that their companies use 6 or more observability tools, including 11% that use 16 or more.