【Design Pattern】Microservices - Distributed Tracing Pattern

Posted by 西维蜀黍 on 2021-08-17, Last Modified on 2024-09-27

Context

You have applied the Microservice architecture pattern. Requests often span multiple services. Each service handles a request by performing one or more operations, e.g. database queries, publishes messages, etc.

Problem

How to understand the behavior of an application and troubleshoot problems?

Forces

  • External monitoring only tells you the overall response time and number of invocations - no insight into the individual operations
  • Any solution should have minimal runtime overhead
  • Log entries for a request are scattered across numerous logs

Solution

Instrument services with code that

  • Assigns each external request a unique external request id
  • Passes the external request id to all services that are involved in handling the request
  • Includes the external request id in all log messages
  • Records information (e.g. start time, end time) about the requests and operations performed when handling a external request in a centralized service

Reference