Greetings, 

We are happy to announce that Site24x7 APM Insight, now supports Distributed Tracing. You can now track transactions made from one application to another across various platforms and languages, and identify the root cause of a problem as and when it occurs. 

What is Distributed Tracing?

Distributed Tracing is the ability to track the flow of a transaction or a request across multiple touchpoints. These touchpoints could be microservices or a series of interconnected applications in a distributed system. 

In general, latency and performance optimization go hand in hand. Let's say your application response time has been slow for the past few days. You need to drill down to the exact problem to figure out the root cause in order to fix it. 

Typically, this would involve investigating multiple components of your applications in silos and correlating your logs based on various factors like timestamps, stack traces of methods, exceptions, and so on. Even after all this analysis, you may or may not have sufficient data to find the root cause and fix it. This is where Distributed Tracing comes handy. 

Instead of individually inspecting multiple application components, Distributed Tracing maps the entire flow of the transaction, including all the calls it makes from one component to another. So when slowness is identified in a particular component, you can inspect all the calls made by the component to identify the origin of the lag. 

In short, instead of asking "where is the problem?" Distributed Tracing enables you to ponder "what is the problem?" 

How Distributed Tracing works in Site24x7 APM Insight

Any transaction that exceeds the specified threshold limit is captured as a trace. When a transaction trace involves multiple application components, it is captured along with its method calls and stack trace with the help of Distributed Tracing. 

Currently, Distributed Tracing is supported in APM Insight Java, .NET, .NET Core, and Node.js agents. Learn more. 

If you have any questions or concerns, let us know in the comments section below, or drop us an email at [email protected].