Getting the Most Out of Tracing Tools for Observability

Tracing tools are an essential part of the observability ecosystem, offering a detailed view of the performance of your applications, especially in complex distributed systems. 

Whether you're working with microservices, Kubernetes clusters, or serverless architectures, tracing tools are key to understanding latency, bottlenecks, and overall system health. 

In this guide, we'll explore some of the most popular open-source and commercial tracing solutions, how they work, and what you should consider when choosing the right tool for your needs.

What are Tracing Tools?

Tracing tools track the journey of requests through a distributed system, allowing you to understand how different services interact with each other. They provide insights into performance, latency, and dependencies, which are crucial for debugging and optimizing systems.

Collecting trace data and visualizing it through graphs or dashboards, tracing tools help identify performance bottlenecks, optimize backend operations, and improve the user experience.

2024’s Best Cloud Monitoring Tools: Updated Insights | Last9

Get a detailed look at the top cloud monitoring tools of 2024. Compare leading solutions to understand their features and performance, helping you choose the best fit for your cloud infrastructure.

Last9

Key Benefits of Tracing Tools

Here’s how tracing tools can help enhance your system’s performance and reliability:

End-to-End Visibility: Tracing tools give you full visibility into how requests are processed across multiple services, even in microservices and cloud-native environments.

Root Cause Identification: With trace requests and trace IDs, tracing tools allow you to identify the root cause of issues like high latency or service failures.

Optimization: Visualizing dependencies and identifying bottlenecks helps optimize system performance and enables data-driven decisions on scaling and resource allocation.

Real-Time Monitoring: Many tools offer real-time tracing data, which is vital for diagnosing performance issues and troubleshooting problems as they occur.

Popular Distributed Tracing Tools

Jaeger

Jaeger is one of the most popular open-source distributed tracing tools, backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

It’s highly scalable and can handle large amounts of trace data, making it a great fit for microservices architectures. Jaeger’s visualization and graphing capabilities help developers quickly spot latency issues and performance bottlenecks in their systems.

OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry is an open-source project designed to provide APIs and SDKs for instrumentation, data collection, and context propagation.

It supports multiple programming languages (such as Java, Python, and Go) and can integrate seamlessly with backends like Last9, Jaeger, Zipkin, and Prometheus. With OpenTelemetry, developers can standardize the collection of telemetry data, including traces, metrics, and logs.

OpenTelemetry vs. Traditional APM Tools | Last9

This article explores OpenTelemetry vs. traditional APM tools, comparing their strengths, weaknesses, and use cases to help you choose wisely.

Last9

Last9

Last9 is designed to simplify observability by bringing together metrics, logs, and traces in one unified view.

This integration makes it easier for teams to connect the dots across their systems, improve alert management, and simplify troubleshooting. Last9 enhances your monitoring experience by easily integrating with tools like Prometheus and OpenTelemetry, providing deeper insights into performance and errors.

It’s particularly helpful for teams managing distributed systems and microservices architectures, offering a holistic view of your infrastructure and services.

Zipkin

Zipkin is another open-source distributed tracing system. It’s lightweight and integrates well with other monitoring tools like Grafana and Prometheus. Zipkin captures trace data from across your services and provides powerful querying and visualization options for troubleshooting latency and bottleneck issues.

New Relic

New Relic is a commercial APM (Application Performance Monitoring) tool that offers powerful distributed tracing capabilities. It provides real-time monitoring of applications and services, making it a strong choice for enterprises that need more advanced features like anomaly detection and alerting.

How Distributed Tracing Works

Distributed tracing tools track trace IDs as requests travel through different services. These requests pass through APIs, databases, and event queues (like Kafka or Cassandra), and each hop generates trace data that is collected by the tracing system.

Tools like Jaeger, Zipkin, OpenTelemetry, and Last9 capture this data and allow you to visualize the flow of requests in dashboards. The data can be used to pinpoint where performance issues are arising, whether they’re due to database queries, network latency, or service dependencies.

Last9, for example, provides a unified view of metrics, logs, and traces, helping teams to easily correlate data and troubleshoot issues across distributed systems.

Probo Cuts Monitoring Costs by 90% with Last9 | Last9

Read how Probo uses Last9 as an alternative to New Relic and Cloudwatch for infrastructure monitoring.

Download PDF

Choosing the Right Distributed Tracing Tool

When selecting a tracing tool for your project, consider the following:

Language Compatibility: Make sure the tool supports the languages your application is written in (such as Java, Python, Go, etc.).

Integration with Monitoring Tools: Tools like Last9, Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk, or Datadog are often integrated with tracing tools for a more complete observability platform.

Scalability: If your system is expected to grow, choose a tool that can handle high volumes of trace data, like Last9.

Pricing: Consider both free and paid options. Open-source tools like Jaeger and Zipkin are free, while tools like Last9 or Datadog offer more advanced features but come with a pricing structure, with Last9 being particularly cost-effective.

Serverless Support: If you are using serverless computing, make sure the tracing tool supports environments like AWS Lambda and Kubernetes.

Benefits of OpenTracing Tools

OpenTracing is a vendor-neutral API for distributed tracing, and using tools like OpenTelemetry provides several benefits:

Standardization: OpenTracing allows you to instrument your code once and switch between backends (Last9, Jaeger, Zipkin, New Relic) without changing the code.
Flexibility: OpenTracing tools work across different programming languages, making them suitable for diverse application stacks.
Improved Debugging: Tracking trace data helps developers troubleshoot issues in a microservices architecture, allowing them to identify dependencies and performance bottlenecks.

OTEL Collector Monitoring: Best Practices & Guide | Last9

Learn how to effectively monitor the OTEL Collector with best practices and implementation strategies for improved system performance.

Last9Last9

Distributed Tracing in Serverless Environments

The most common question is, can distributed tracing work in serverless environments?

Yes! Tools like AWS X-Ray, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, and Last9 can be integrated with serverless platforms like AWS Lambda or Google Cloud Functions. They help track latency, bottlenecks, and other performance issues, ensuring that serverless applications are running smoothly and performance is optimized.

Key Features to Look for in APM and Tracing Tools

When evaluating Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and tracing tools, look for these key features:

Real-time Data: To catch issues as they happen.
Integration with Metrics and Logs: A complete observability solution combines traces, logs, and metrics.
Visualization: Graphs, dashboards, and trace maps help visualize the flow of requests and identify issues quickly.
Alerting and Notifications: Some tools, like Last9, New Relic, and Datadog, offer notifications for anomalies or performance issues.

Conclusion

Tracing tools are integral to observability, providing deep insights into system performance, especially in distributed environments like Kubernetes, microservices, and serverless systems.

To enhance your observability experience and gain deeper insights into your infrastructure, give Last9 a try. It offers a unified platform that integrates traces, metrics, and logs, simplifying troubleshooting and optimizing system performance.

Using Last9’s high cardinality workflows, we were able to accurately measure customer SLAs across dimensions, extract knowledge about our systems, and measure customer impact proactively. — Ranjeet Walunj, SVP Engineering, CleverTap

FAQs

What is the best tool for tracing?
The best tool for tracing depends on your specific needs. For open-source options, Jaeger and OpenTelemetry are highly popular. New Relic is a good commercial choice for enterprise-level monitoring.

Why are tracing tools important?
Tracing tools provide end-to-end visibility into the flow of requests, helping developers identify bottlenecks, latency issues, and the root cause of performance problems.

What is a Jaeger tool?
Jaeger is an open-source distributed tracing tool that provides powerful visualization and querying capabilities to help monitor and optimize distributed systems.

How to choose the right distributed tracing tool?
Consider factors such as language compatibility, integration with monitoring tools, scalability, and pricing when choosing a tracing tool for your system.

How Do Tracing Tools Help Debugging Microservices Architecture? Tracing tools are invaluable in debugging microservices architectures. With multiple services involved, it's easy for issues to be hidden. Tracing tools track the flow of requests between these services and context propagation to show where issues occur, whether due to network latency, service dependencies, or resource bottlenecks.

Which Tracing Tools are Compatible with Microservices Architecture?
Distributed tracing tools like Last9, Jaeger, Zipkin, and OpenTelemetry are designed to work well with microservices-based architectures. These tools provide visualization and trace data for all services involved in processing a request, allowing you to troubleshoot and optimize each step of the request’s journey.