Observability Practitioners Summit 2019

Distributed tracing has emerged as the go-to solution for understanding what’s going on in the ever-changing cloud native architectures. A single trace can reveal many things: network latencies, time spent in databases, a service spinning idly, etc. but finding the right trace among billions that demonstrates a problem in a large distributed application is very hard. By looking at traces in aggregate, we can eliminate the need to state and validate hypotheses and instead answers start to emerge naturally. Especially when we use creative visualizations that put our visual cortex to work without overloading it with useless information. This talk will present the power of aggregate analysis of distributed traces by highlight its applications beyond performance troubleshooting.