ASP.NET Core Distributed Tracing
Introduction Distributed tracing is a technique that allows us to detect failures and performance issues in distributed applications. For example, you send a request to a web app and this web app needs, in turn, to talk to one or more microservices, and possibly some of these microservices need also to talk to others. Distributed tracing is a way to correlate all these calls under the same umbrella. This is usually achieved through special request headers that must be present for distributed tracing to take place. ASP.NET Core offers mechanisms to make our lives easier when working with these headers, which is an implementation of the OpenTelemetry standard. OpenTelemetry is an observability framework and toolkit designed to create and manage telemetry data such as traces, metrics, and logs. For now, we'll focus on the building blocks of distributed tracing. You can think of a distributed trace as a transaction with an identifier and many operations, which are ocorring on ...