Jaeger – A Distributed Tracing System • Hacker News Board

Re: Jaeger – A Distributed Tracing System

#41

Post by sulam » Mon, Sep 25, 2017, 3:45 AM UTC

foota wrote: post #20

the_evacuator wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Seems like you could store the raw arguments to printf and then only process them later if you decide you want the trace?

In order to store them you have to serialize them.

Re: Jaeger – A Distributed Tracing System

#42

Post by AYBABTME » Mon, Sep 25, 2017, 5:42 AM UTC

dankohn1 wrote: post #33

yoshuaw wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, OpenTracing is an API, with bindings currently available in 9 languages. Please take a look. http://opentracing.io/

Only the semantics and libraries implementing them are there. The wire format is not specified, which is a pretty annoying problem to deal with.

Re: Jaeger – A Distributed Tracing System

#43

Post by KGIII » Mon, Sep 25, 2017, 6:15 AM UTC

dsnuh wrote: post #24

jjjensen90 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They may know it from Jagermeister and jäger bombs.

We may not know our history, but we do like drinking.

Re: Jaeger – A Distributed Tracing System

#44

Post by trampi » Mon, Sep 25, 2017, 6:34 AM UTC

Shameless plug:

A friend of mine, Felix Barnsteiner, wrote a profiler for Java based applications, called stagemonitor [1]. He started working on it in 2013 for his masters thesis. Since then, he steadily worked on it in the company as well as in his spare time. Some months ago, he implemented support for distributed tracing. Stagemonitor implements Open Tracing. It also collects frontend performance data, called end user monitoring. They get correlated automatically. And the best thing about it: stagemonitor is free and open source (APL). Get in touch if you have any questions.

[1]: http://www.stagemonitor.org/

Re: Jaeger – A Distributed Tracing System

#45

Post by laichzeit0 » Mon, Sep 25, 2017, 7:03 AM UTC

How is this different from e.g. AppDynamics or Dynatrace for example? Technically speaking, not free/commercial.

From the documentation it doesn't look like much, except probably the biggest downside is that you have to add your instrumentation points manually? i.e. there is code change required.

Re: Jaeger – A Distributed Tracing System

#46

Post by dastbe » Mon, Sep 25, 2017, 7:44 AM UTC

dankohn1 wrote: post #32

muninn_ wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have used that landscape document as a very informative point of reference for the last couple of months. Thank you for creating it.

You're very welcome. You cannot imagine the amount of criticism it has engendered.

How do you plan on keeping it sane over time? Even disregarding paring down the number of times managed major providers appear on the list (which is super sensible imo), won't it start to get quite crowded with all the open source competitors appearing?

Re: Jaeger – A Distributed Tracing System

#47

Post by wisswazz » Mon, Sep 25, 2017, 7:58 AM UTC

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?

Last week I did a test of Linkerd with Zipkin for k8s clusters. Works like a charm, buy still a bit more work to use Jaeger as Zipkin replacement, as they do not support the same protocols yet. I believe https://github.com/linkerd/linkerd-zipkin will fix that but haven't tested yet.

Re: Jaeger – A Distributed Tracing System

#48

Post by mrmondo » Mon, Sep 25, 2017, 8:22 AM UTC

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?

I see Zipkin is a Java app, without sounding like I’m hating on a language for no reason here - but I wonder if it’s awfully heavy and slow to launch like so most other java apps? By comparison I’d expect a tracer written in Go would be significantly more efficient.

Re: Jaeger – A Distributed Tracing System

#49

Post by idunno246 » Mon, Sep 25, 2017, 8:35 AM UTC

mrmondo wrote: post #48

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?

I see Zipkin is a Java app, without sounding like I’m hating on a language for no reason here - but I wonder if it’s awfully heavy and slow to launch like so most other java apps? By comparison I’d expect a tracer written in Go would be significantly more efficient.

it's irrelevant. if you take a look at the diagrams in the blog post that include zipkin, it's is basically only the query/frontend portion - the tracing itself is done natively in the language the code is written in, and outputted to cassandra. The zipkin part is a long running server that just needs to query cassandra.

Re: Jaeger – A Distributed Tracing System

#50

Post by vbsteven » Mon, Sep 25, 2017, 8:40 AM UTC

mrmondo wrote: post #48

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?

I see Zipkin is a Java app, without sounding like I’m hating on a language for no reason here - but I wonder if it’s awfully heavy and slow to launch like so most other java apps? By comparison I’d expect a tracer written in Go would be significantly more efficient.

Does slow startup time matter for services that are supposed to be running continuously in a cluster environment?

I have no doubt that a Go tracer would start orders of magnitudes faster than a Java one (especially if it pulls in spring or other web-related dependencies for the zipkin UI) but I think it is irrelevant.