Traces Are the Fuel: Making Distributed Tracing Valuable

Within our industry, it's now common knowledge that any sane microservices strategy must also account for some form of distributed tracing. However, while basic distributed traces are a good start, they are not enough to deliver true confidence about the behavior of modern production systems. In this talk, we begin with a quick refresher on the basics of distributed tracing, then show how individual distributed traces fall short of explaining critical – yet commonplace – failure modes in production. The brunt of the talk will revisit those scenarios with the benefit of various forms of aggregate trace analysis. Through these examples, we will come to understand what's possible when we go beyond individual traces to deliver more valuable insights.