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Monitoring and troubleshooting distributed systems like those built with microservices is challenging. Traditional monitoring tools struggle with distributed systems as they were made for a single component. Distributed tracing solves this problem by tracking a transaction across components. In this article, we will implement distributed tracing for a Java Spring Boot application with three microservices.

OpenTelemetry consists of several main components. But to understand the architecture, we will start by understanding some of the key design principles behind the design and architecture of OpenTelemetry. But before that, let us have a brief overview of OpenTelemetry.

Any application you build has three distinct layers - a server-side interface, a client-side interface and the central codebase. In a monolith application, all these programs are written in a single language, and placed in the same web stack as well. Earlier web applications were written this way.

As an open source company that grew out of a side project in 2008 to an application and performance monitoring platform (APM) used by over 3.5 million developers, Sentry is committed to open source and the community of developers maintaining and building in the open. Similarly, we take a public approach to building our software, which is why it’s a natural extension of our values to announce our support for OpenTelemetry (or OTel), the leading open standard for observability.

In this blog, we will explore how distributed tracing works in Application Insights and how to use it to diagnose the issues in a distributed application. Azure Application Insights is a powerful tool for monitoring and diagnosing application performance issues and supports distributed tracing. It is an extension of Azure Monitor and provides Application Performance Monitoring features out of the box.

Instrumenting your code is essential to understanding your system’s performance and diagnosing issues as they arise. Traditionally, this was accomplished using proprietary vendor libraries, causing major lock-in. Enter OpenTelemetry. OpenTelemetry is an open-source project that provides a set of APIs, SDKs, and integrations for instrumenting code.

Serverless developers are undoubtedly familiar with the challenge of cold starts, which describe spikes in latency caused by new function containers being initialized in response to increasing traffic. Though cold starts are usually rare in production deployments, it’s still important to understand their causes and how to mitigate their impact on your workload.