Distributed tracing is a critical tool for debugging and understanding microservices. But setting up tracing libraries across all services can be costly—especially in systems composed of services written in disparate languages and frameworks. In this post, we’ll show you how you can easily add distributed tracing to your polyglot system by combining linkerd, our open source RPC proxy, with Zipkin, a popular open source distributed tracing framework.
Why distributed tracing? As companies move from monolithic to multi-service architectures, existing techniques for debugging and profiling begin to break down. Previously, troubleshooting could be accomplished by isolating a single instance of the monolith and reproducing the problem. With microservices, this approach is no longer feasible, because no single service provides a complete picture of the performance or correctness of the application as a whole. We need new tools to help us manage the real complexity of operating distributed systems at scale.
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