Tracing applications
In the previous chapter, we learned about logging and how logging can give us visibility into what’s going on inside our application. The line between logging and tracing is blurry; what we need to understand is that logging just provides information on what a process is currently doing, while tracing gives us cross-cutting visibility across different components, allowing us to get a better understanding of the data flow and time taken for a process to complete.
For example, with tracing, we can answer questions such as the following:
- How long does the add-to-cart process take?
- How long does it take to download a payment file?
We will go through the different APIs that are outlined in the specification and implement those APIs using the implementation provided by the OpenTelemetry library.
The following figure shows the links between different entities.
Figure 3.2 – Tracing an API relationship
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