Distributed tracing is a household term nowadays – if your house is an IT department! Modern enterprises use cloud-native applications for agility and responsiveness to customer needs. When monitoring cloud-native applications, distributed tracing follows how transactions perform while traversing services or containers in the backend architecture. By definition, we’re describing production applications with requests, methods, database calls and logs that accompany a transaction.
OK, first things first. I have to admit that I am, first and foremost, an old-school UNIX systems administrator. I’m that grizzled sysadmin in your shop who soliloquizes wistfully about managing UUCP for email “back in the day.” Centralizing Logs? Yeah, we had syslog, and saved it all off to compressed files.