Tracing the behavior of distributed cloud applications

Many of the computer programs we use today are distributed systems running in datacenters. For people who run and maintain these programs, diagnosing problems can be very challenging, because symptoms and root causes can be spread across many different machines and system components. In order to make it easier to operate complex systems, we need tools that record and analyze their runtime behavior, and to localize and diagnose problems when they Distributed tracing tools piece together what happened at runtime, and can help localize and diagnose problems when they occur.