Weave trimmed troubleshooting fat, cut API response time from seconds to milliseconds with Jaeger.

In this article we will look at the agent-like instrumentation tool T-Trace. The tool provides non-intrusive instrumentation capabilities for applications running on GraalVM. We will instrument a simple NodeJS application by using T-Trace and OpenTracing API with Jaeger NodeJS tracer.

Software monitoring allows developers and IT professionals to observe events occurring within a monitored system. The data gathered by monitoring processes offers visibility into how the monitored entity is behaving and provides warning signs indicating that some aspect of the system deserves greater attention. More and more software is migrating to the cloud, and monolithic software is being decomposed into microservices to create distributed applications.

Meet Stackdriver Logging, a gregarious individual who loves large-scale data and is openly friendly to structured and unstructured data alike. Although they grew up at Google, Stackdriver Logging welcomes data from any cloud or even on-prem. Logging has many close friends, including Monitoring, BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage and all the other Google Cloud services that integrate with them. However, recently, they are looking for a deeper relationship to find insight.

Since AWS Lambda was launched in 2014, serverless has transformed the way applications are built, deployed, and managed. By abstracting away the underlying infrastructure, developers are able to shift operational responsibilities to the cloud provider and focus on solving customer problems.

I will get straight to the point, Jaeger at the moment only visualizes collected data from instrumented applications. It does not perform any post-processing (except service dependency diagram) or any calculations to derive other interesting metrics or features from traces it collects. This is a pity because traces contain the richest information from all telemetry signals combined!