Understanding data paths through infrastructure
Especially applicable to microservice architectures
Transaction: end-to-end request-response flow
Trace: record of a transaction (same trace ID)
Span: connection between two services
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Instrumentation required
Libraries available for multiple languages
Additional dependencies and code
OpenTracing is the defacto standard with many supported tracers
Usually includes (distributed) tracing
Proxy injection provides information about spans
Header propagation usually requires code change
(What is a service mesh and which are available?)
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Little to no advantages from service meshes
Networking topology
More features from CNI vendors