As distributed environments become more complex, users often use distributed tracing tools to improve the visibility of issues evident within their traces. Throughout this post, we will examine some of the best open-source and other generally popular distributed tracing tools available today.

OpenTracing was an open-source project developed to provide vendor-neutral APIs and instrumentation for distributed tracing across a variety of environments. As it is often extremely difficult for engineers to see the behaviour of requests when they are working across services in a distributed environment, OpenTracing aimed to provide a solution to heighten observability.

There are numerous types of services and processes in place to make software development more accessible and efficient for programmers. One ready-for-launch service developers can access remotely is Function as a Service, abbreviated as (FaaS).

Prometheus is among the leading open-source metric-gathering and alerting platforms for managing metrics from microservices architectures. As Prometheus is such a popular choice in the cloud computing landscape today, we will explain how Prometheus metrics can be leveraged for observability.

Systems and applications alike have become progressively distributed as microservices, open-source tools, and containerisation have gained traction. In order to actively monitor and respond quickly to issues that arise in our environment, distributed tracing has proven to be vital for businesses such as Uber, Postmates, Hello Fresh and TransferWise. It is, however, important to clarify what distributed tracing actually means.