In my project this week I got a backlog where I asked to analyze how can we use distributed tracing in our microservices. We already have ELK stack where we check log in Kibana dashboard. I tried to filter calls using co-relation id and this is working fine. However, our application uses Dynatrace also for tracing. My question is if we have ELK stack to check log to find issues in PRD then what extra Dynatrace distributed tracing does? What is main difference that I am not able to understand. Please can anyone try to explain in simple language? I am new to this backlog so some concepts are not proper yet.
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Distributed tracing is an industry method to allow developers to monitor the performance of the APIs that they use without actually being able to analyze the backing microservice’s code.
From off doc:
ELK Distributed tracing enables you to analyze performance throughout your microservice architecture by tracing the entirety of a request — from the initial web request on your front-end service all the way to database queries made on your back-end services.
It works
by injecting a custom traceparent HTTP header into outgoing requests. This header includes information, like trace-id, which is used to identify the current trace, and parent-id, which is used to identify the parent of the current span on incoming requests or the current span on an outgoing request.
Dynatrace distributed tracing is almost the same plus code execution analysis. In Dynatrace words: Purepaths plus Code-level visibility and AI-based application performance monitor. Easy way to identify how your microservices works together, full service flow and problem analysis.
More explanations from Dynatrace blog
Ivan Vovk
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