Distributed Tracing: From Theory to Practice
summary
Claims that metadata propagation plus whitebox tracing gives near realtime, causal visibility and that Zipkin is the practical Ruby-compatible option. Implementation details: instrument Rails via Rack middleware, add HTTP-client hooks for Faraday/Excon, propagate trace/parent/span IDs, async transport with SuckerPunch to a Zipkin collector, run Zipkin on Heroku behind NGINX and basic auth or oauth2proxy for access control. A four‑engineer tools team gets a working Zipkin deployment in a few months; watch for custom SQL scrubbing and host‑agent limitations.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Introduction to tracing
- 2:02The case for distributed systems
- 8:06Black box vs white box tracing
- 12:26Tracing architecture and spans
- 18:56Instrumenting with middleware
- 22:54Evaluating tracing solutions
- 32:40Security and next steps
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