Trace at Your Own Pace: Three Easy Ways to Get Started with Distributed Tracing

Summary:

Stepping through a trace is an invaluable debugging workflow, providing a way to follow requests from service to service even as the applications we manage become more complex and distributed. That same complexity can make getting started with distributed tracing feel overwhelming, but it’s important to remember that instrumenting your code is an additive process—you don’t need to boil the ocean. A trace through a thousand services starts with a single ID.

At Honeycomb, we’ve helped countless customers start their tracing journey, and in this technical session we’ll take you through some small steps you can take that start adding up to a big impact.

We cover:

- Giving logs some structure: adding request IDs to start planting the seeds that will sprout a root (span). Now you have the foundation for the rest of your trace and can build it out piece by piece.
- Automagic with agents: Want a bit more than a foundation? Honeycomb distributions build a baseline trace with minimal fuss – sort of a starter home for your traces, that you can remodel to taste.
- Tracing before prod: Traces can help you debug your builds as well as your apps! Add traces to your CI/CD process with buildevents, and see where your bottlenecks live.