We’re all generating huge amounts of data every day. Whether we’re driving our car, ordering pizza on the web or even when carrying our mobile while walking the dog. The challenge of processing and storing has been addressed many times and is widely paraphrased with the term Big Data. Often these systems are pieced together by many components communicating with each other. The trend of decoupling applications into smaller microservices is still ongoing, as it gets cheaper and easier to run serverless architectures in the cloud. However, this flexibility comes with difficult error analysis and traceability in distributed systems. How do we monitor which system was involved when processing a specific request and how long did it take to respond? How do we figure out which service is causing a request to fail and why? How do we know which microservice caused the slow processing of a request?

In this talk, we will give an overview of different tracing systems, introduce the OpenTracing standard, explain how a system has to be designed to carry the necessary tracing information and show how to efficiently track down errors in a distributed system.