Since most applications today are distributed in some fashion, monitoring their health and performance requires a new approach. Enter distributed tracing, a method of profiling and monitoring distributed applicationsparticularly those that use microservice architectures. Theres just one problem: distributed tracing can be hard. But it doesnt have to be.With this guide, youll learn what distributed tracing is and how to use it to understand the performance and operation of your software. Key players at LightStep and other organizations walk you through instrumenting your code for tracing, collecting the data that your instrumentation produces, and turning it into useful operational insights. If you want to implement distributed tracing, this book tells you what you need to know.Youll learn:The pieces of a distributed tracing deployment: instrumentation, data collection, and analysisBest practices for instrumentation: methods for generating trace data from your servicesHow to deal with (or avoid) overhead using sampling and other techniquesHow to use distributed tracing to improve baseline performance and to mitigate regressions quicklyWhere distributed tracing is headed in the future