Tracing is More Than Traces: The Insights in Trace Aggregates

The value proposition for distributed tracing is well-understood: assembling and visualizing end-to-end transactions helps to identify latency bottlenecks and provides a head-start on problem diagnosi …

The value proposition for distributed tracing is well-understood: assembling and visualizing end-to-end transactions helps to identify latency bottlenecks and provides a head-start on problem diagnosis. Yet the data from traces – when aggregated – can reveal much more, and can do so with greater precision and certainty. This talk presents the profound insights trace aggregates help unlock, including sources of resource contention, latency anomalies in the context of service infrastructure, and correlations of metrics with high-cardinality characteristics of the distributed system. The talk demonstrates, using concrete examples, how novel applications of aggregated traces reveal new opportunities for performance improvements. However, aggregation is not possible without a standardized tracing output format, as well as a proliferation of traces via cloud-native service mesh integration.