Modern software development drives innovation for companies of all sizes and shapes, enabling them to deliver differentiated customer experiences, accelerate time to market, and gain the agility needed to meet their target outcomes. However, the downside of modern environments and architectures is complexity, making it more difficult to quickly diagnose and resolve performance issues and errors that impact customer experience.
The answer is observability, which cuts through software complexity with end-to-end visibility that enables teams to solve problems faster, work smarter, and create better digital experiences for their customers. Observability creates context and actionable insight by, among other things, combining four essential types of observability data: metrics, events, logs, and traces.
Traces—more precisely, distributed traces—are essential for software teams considering a move to (or already transitioning to) the cloud and adopting microservices. That’s because distributed tracing is the best way to quickly understand what happens to requests as they transit through the microservices that make up your distributed applications.
Whether you’re a business leader, DevOps engineer, product owner, site reliability engineer, software team leader, or other stakeholder, you can use this ebook to get a quick introduction into what distributed tracing is all about, how it works, and when your teams should be using it.