This post illustrates some practical examples of distributed context propagation. More detailed examples are presented in Chapter 10 of my book, Mastering Distributed Tracing.

In this article we will demonstrate some of the tracing features of the MicroProfile-OpenTracing project while evaluating performance of new Java runtime Quarkus. You will also learn how a Java application can be compiled to native code for supersonic performance!

Jaeger was built from day 1 to be able to ingest huge amounts of data in a resilient way. To better utilize resources that might cause delays, such as storage or network communications, Jaeger buffers and batches data. When more spans are generated than Jaeger is able to safely process, spans might get dropped. However, the defaults might not fit all scenarios: for instance, agents running as a sidecar might have more memory constraints than agents running as a daemon in bare metal.

Jaeger is composed of different components, each potentially running in its own host. It might be the case that one of these moving parts isn’t working properly, causing spans to not be processed and stored. When something goes wrong, make sure to check the items listed here.