Why Distributed Tracing is Essential for Performance and Reliability

Many engineering organizations are adopting microservices or other loosely coupled architectures, often alongside DevOps practices. Together these have enabled individual service teams to become more independent and, as a result, have boosted developer velocity.

However, this increased velocity often comes at the cost of overall application performance or reliability. Worse, teams often don’t understand what’s affecting performance or reliability – or even who to ask to learn more. Distributed tracing was developed at organizations like Google and Twitter to address these problems.

In this talk, we’ll cover the fundamentals of distributed tracing and how it can be not only used to understand a distributed system, but also prioritize engineering work. As part of an observability platform, tracing can improve communication among teams, support other DevOps practices, and ultimately bring performance and reliability back until control.