Distributed Tracing in the Xen Ecosystem: Through the Toolstack and Beyond - Marcus Granado

Original upload: 2023 Jul 12

Distributed Tracing in the Xen Ecosystem: Through the Toolstack and Beyond - Marcus Granado, XenServer

The Distributed Tracing methodology and associated tools have grown into industry-wide standards like OpenTelemetry. The higher levels of the cloud environments running inside guests are now regularly using DT to improve performance, debuggability and facilitate onboarding of new contributors to complex projects. In XenServer, we are bringing these benefits to the lower levels of the cloud environments at the hypervisor layer beneath the guests. This talk will present the main concepts of DT, how it can be useful in the Xen ecosystem across all the layers of the cloud environments, and the initial experience of XenServer adopting DT in the XAPI toolstack with examples of benefits we found on operations like VM.start/migrate/etc. At the end, we hope to start design discussions intended to explore the best ways forward to integrate the Xen hypervisor into this distributed tracing tree.