Most applications today are distributed in some fashion. Monitoring the health and performance of these distributed architectures requires a new approach. Enter distributed tracing, a method of profiling and monitoring applications—especially those that use microservice architectures. There’s just one problem: distributed tracing can be hard. But it doesn’t have to be. With this practical guide, you’ll learn what distributed tracing is and how to use it to understand the performance and operation of your software. Key players at LightStep walk you through instrumenting your code for tracing, collecting the data that your instrumentation produces, and turning it into useful, operational insights. If you want to start implementing distributed tracing, this book tells you what you need to know. You’ll learn: The pieces of a distributed tracing deployment: Instrumentation, data collection, and delivering value Best practices for instrumentation (the methods for generating trace data from your service) How to deal with or avoid overhead, costs, and sampling How to work with spans (the building blocks of request-based distributed traces) and choose span characteristics that lead to valuable traces Where distributed tracing is headed in the future