Company
Date Published
Author
Aviad Mor
Word count
1807
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Today's modern applications are built on a broad set of microservices, with containers and serverless architectures becoming the preferred choice for many cloud-based applications. These architectures provide highly scalable systems but add new complexities that make gaining visibility and control increasingly difficult. The article focuses on understanding observability issues in serverless and containerized environments and how to address them in practice. Monitoring is a crucial aspect of application management, allowing administrators and developers to track an application's health and performance, identify errors or issues, and help with fast recovery time and minimal user impact. However, traditional methods like monitoring and logging alone are no longer enough to serve the complexities of cloud-native architectures, highlighting the need for distributed tracing. Distributed tracing provides end-to-end observability and easy debugging, allowing developers to quickly drill down and identify the root cause of issues in highly distributed environments. By understanding the components of distributed tracing, including generating, ingesting, and consuming traces, developers can implement a DIY solution or use third-party platforms that simplify visualization and provide advanced capabilities. To achieve effective distributed tracing, it is essential to automate processes from day one, collect traces from all components within the application, and correlate logs and metrics for a complete tracing solution. Ultimately, designing architecture with desired application functionality in mind and incorporating distributed tracing will increase efficiency and reduce troubleshooting time.