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Jaeger – A Distributed Tracing System

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Re: Jaeger – A Distributed Tracing System

#21

Post by necubi »

justinclift wrote: post #18
necubi wrote: post #14

I'm disappointed that all of the open-source tracing systems have adopted the Dapper [0] model. It's understandable why: it's extremely simple to implement, as it handles scaling challenges by doing client-side sampling. A bit of background about how Dapper-style distributed tracing works. Things typically start with an RPC call of some kind (typically from an external source like a public load balancer). At that poi…

LightStep sounds interesting, but it seems to be closed source? That being the case, it's not hard to see why people are going with the (existing) OSS solutions. :/ UPDATE - Found this on GitHub, is this the whole thing? https://github.com/lightstep/lightstep-tracer-go If so, pointing people towards it from the .com website might help get people trying it out, as the .com website makes it seem non-OSS. :)

Lightstep is closed source. They have opensource libraries that get data into the system (like the go one you linked to) but to actually use it you need the hosted service.

I hope to be releasing an open-source version of that approach in the next several months.

Re: Jaeger – A Distributed Tracing System

#22

Post by necubi »

the_evacuator wrote: post #17
necubi wrote: post #14

I'm disappointed that all of the open-source tracing systems have adopted the Dapper [0] model. It's understandable why: it's extremely simple to implement, as it handles scaling challenges by doing client-side sampling. A bit of background about how Dapper-style distributed tracing works. Things typically start with an RPC call of some kind (typically from an external source like a public load balancer). At that poi…

That sounds pretty expensive. With dapper the trace span annotations do nothing if the request isn’t being traced. If it is being traced you might have significant costs, along the lines of sprintf(“%.03f”, ...) or other very cpu-intensive activity. This is OK when you trace one per million but when you trace everything you have to think about the cost. This could lead to either just using more CPU than you really wa…

Yeah, that's definitely an upside of the dapper approach--very, very minimal overhead for non-traced requests. However for the vast majority of use cases a bit of overhead (microseconds per span) tends to be unnoticeable, and the benefits in terms of introspectability are huge. In general, the overhead is mitigated by the fact that spans tend to be pretty large (on the ms-scale).

Re: Jaeger – A Distributed Tracing System

#23

Post by pebers »

shevy wrote: post #5

I don't like the name. For those who don't know german, Jaeger is "Jäger" is hunter/ranger. A somewhat neutral term in itself but there is also a slight, somewhat remote connection towards some part of the history ("Jagdstaffel" and what not). I have absolutely no idea if this has anything to do with it, mind you - but since the main authors appear to be in the USA, I find that very awkward. Why not just stick to som…

Apart from the pop-culture references others have mentioned, the top Google search result is a fairly well-known fashion brand (https://www.jaeger.co.uk), I don't think anyone is that bothered by it. I'd guess the reason for using Jaeger vs. Jäger is simply that the former is much easier to type on many keyboards.

You might be reading a bit more into it than is warranted.

Re: Jaeger – A Distributed Tracing System

#24

Post by dsnuh »

jjjensen90 wrote: post #8
shevy wrote: post #5

I don't like the name. For those who don't know german, Jaeger is "Jäger" is hunter/ranger. A somewhat neutral term in itself but there is also a slight, somewhat remote connection towards some part of the history ("Jagdstaffel" and what not). I have absolutely no idea if this has anything to do with it, mind you - but since the main authors appear to be in the USA, I find that very awkward. Why not just stick to som…

This is a pretty silly objection. There are plenty of software projects named from a variety of languages not native to the creator of the package. And Jäger has so many neutral meanings and even for a German wouldn't first bring thoughts of the Jagdstaffel I don't think... Also writing the ä as ae is very common for those who have keyboards without umlaut characters... I've seen it lots of times and doesn't look too…

Absolutely. "Hunter" seems like a perfectly acceptable name for something that collects data, and I can almost guarantee that the vast majority of Americans have never even heard of the term. Most Americans in my experience have have little to no knowledge of WWI, let alone the Jadgstaffl. To object to the name on such grounds seems pedantic in the extreme to me.

Edit: typo

Re: Jaeger – A Distributed Tracing System

#25

Post by justinclift »

necubi wrote: post #21
justinclift wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LightStep sounds interesting, but it seems to be closed source? That being the case, it's not hard to see why people are going with the (existing) OSS solutions. :/ UPDATE - Found this on GitHub, is this the whole thing? https://github.com/lightstep/lightstep-tracer-go If so, pointing people towards it from the .com website might help get people trying it out, as the .com website makes it seem non-OSS. :)

Lightstep is closed source. They have opensource libraries that get data into the system (like the go one you linked to) but to actually use it you need the hosted service. I hope to be releasing an open-source version of that approach in the next several months.

Thanks, please do. :)

Re: Jaeger – A Distributed Tracing System

#29

Post by manigandham »

bronz wrote: post #26

what is tracing?

In this context, it's the network-wide version of a stack trace.

Instead of just method calls in a process, you take a top-level (HTTP) request and see all the various upstream service calls and their internal logic involved in completing that request. Useful for micro/multi-service based architectures but you can trace anything because it's a standard output format.

Re: Jaeger – A Distributed Tracing System

#30

Post by yoshuaw »

dankohn1 wrote: post #13
jhinds wrote: post #4

Neat! I was looking into tracing solutions for our k8s cluster the other day and was going to look into setting up Zipkin. Now I'll this to my list of tools to evaluate. I found this blog post by uber informative https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/ so maybe there is no need to even setting up Zipkin and just start with Jaegar?

Most folks will choose either Zipkin or Jaeger, but both are OpenTracing-compatible distributed tracing systems. You might find the Cloud Native Landscape useful for thinking about the options: https://github.com/cncf/landscape/blob/master/README.md Disclosure: I’m the executive director of CNCF, which just adopted Jaeger 2 weeks ago, and I’m an author of the landscape.

Last I checked "OpenTracing-compatible" only went as far as using common terminology. Tbh I was a bit disappointed by this; has more been defined since? E.g. are there now shared schemas, APIs of sorts?
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