The three pillars of observability are logs, metrics, and tracing. Most teams are able to handle logs and metrics, while proper tracing can still be a challenge. On this podcast, we talk with Yuri Shkuro, the creator of Jaeger, author of the book Mastering Distributed Tracing, and a software engineer at Uber, about how the Jaeger tracing backend implements the OpenTracing API to handle distributed tracing.
 
Why listen to the podcast:

 - Jaeger is an open-source tracing backend, developed at Uber. It also has a collection of libraries that implement the OpenTracing API.
 - At a high level, Jaeger is very similar to Zipkin, but Jaeger has features not available in Zipkin, including adaptive sampling and advanced visualization tools in the UI.
 - Tracing is less expensive than logging because data is sampled. It also gives you a complete view of the system. You can see a macro view of the transaction, and how it interacted with dozens of microservices, while still being able to drill down into the details of one service.
 - If you have only a handful of services, you can probably get away with logging and metrics, but once the complexity increases to dozens, hundreds, or thousands of microservices, you must have tracing.
 - Tracing does not work with a black box approach to the application. You can't simply use a service mesh then add a tracing framework. You need correlation between a single request and all the subsequent requests that it generates. A service mesh still relies on the underlying components handling that correlation.

More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2ZlvMyR
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Show Notes

Yuri Shkuro on Tracing Distributed Systems Using Jaeger

Software engineers, architects and team leads have found inspiration to drive change and innovation in their team by listening to the weekly InfoQ Podcast. They have received essential information that helped them validate their software development map. We have achieved that by interviewing some of the top CTOs, engineers and technology directors from companies like Uber, Netflix and more. Over 1,200,000 downloads in the last 3 years.