What you will learn
- Understand spans and traces
- Use OpenTelemetry
- Find latency bottlenecks
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The basics, in plain English
In modern apps, one click might touch many small services. Distributed tracing follows a single request as it hops from service to service and records how long each step took. It is like putting a tracking number on a package so you can see every stop on its journey.
- Trace
- The full recorded journey of one request through your whole system.
- Span
- One step in that journey, such as a single service handling part of the work.
- Latency
- How long a step or the whole request took to finish.
- Distributed
- Spread across many separate services or machines.
- Trace ID
- A shared label that ties all the steps of one request together.
- Bottleneck
- The slowest step that holds up the whole request, which tracing helps you find.
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Traces
A trace is a tree of spans showing how a request flowed and where time went. OpenTelemetry is the vendor-neutral standard.
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