When we talk about instrumentation, we’re mainly focused on the OpenTracing API. It was created by industry experts to solve a growing and recognized problem — how to gain visibility into distributed systems. The OpenTracing API is a layer that sits between the origin of the data that we want to gain visibility into (such as the application logic, microservices frameworks, and RPC libraries), and it feeds it to the LightStep tracer system.
Getting Started
To begin instrumentation, we recommend identifying the relevant frameworks. Modern distributed systems consist of large, shared libraries. Often, the OpenTracing community has already provided some helper plugins that can add tracing and instrumentation to these libraries. Anything that can’t be covered with these libraries can be instrumented directly with the OpenTracing API, so there are no gaps in tracing and instrumentation. Finally, we provide the LightStep tracer library in order to send the data to our SaaS backend and present it for analysis.