2.4.4. Understanding distributed tracing

Every time a user takes an action in an application, a request is executed by the architecture that may require dozens of different services to participate to produce a response. Red Hat OpenShift Distributed Tracing Platform lets you perform distributed tracing, which records the path of a request through various microservices that make up an application.

Distributed tracing is a technique that is used to tie the information about different units of work together — usually executed in different processes or hosts — to understand a whole chain of events in a distributed transaction. Developers can visualize call flows in large microservice architectures with distributed tracing. It is valuable for understanding serialization, parallelism, and sources of latency.

Red Hat OpenShift Distributed Tracing Platform records the execution of individual requests across the whole stack of microservices, and presents them as traces. A trace is a data/execution path through the system. An end-to-end trace consists of one or more spans.

A span represents a logical unit of work in Red Hat OpenShift Distributed Tracing Platform that has an operation name, the start time of the operation, and the duration, as well as potentially tags and logs. Spans may be nested and ordered to model causal relationships.

As a service owner, you can use distributed tracing to instrument your services to gather insights into your service architecture. You can use Red Hat OpenShift Distributed Tracing Platform for monitoring, network profiling, and troubleshooting the interaction between components in modern, cloud-native, microservices-based applications.

With Distributed Tracing Platform, you can perform the following functions:

You can combine Distributed Tracing Platform with other relevant components of the OpenShift Container Platform: