An introduction to distributed tracing

With the rise of single-page web apps and microservice architectures, web applications are becoming increasingly complex. The old tools with which we used to monitor the performance of monolith applications are no longer sufficient. To better understand how data is flowing between the different components of your application and to detect the bottlenecks before it's too late, you need a new set of tools to monitor the whole stack — enter distributed tracing.

This talk will focus on what distributed tracing is, how to roll it out across your infrastructure, and how to use it to gain better insights and fix problems.

This talk aims to give the listener a better understanding of distributed tracing and why it's important. It will focus on the OpenTracing standard developed to make your monitoring solution vendor-neutral, and will use examples from Elastic APM — the newest open source project coming to the Elastic Stack.