Although my master thesis was in local tracing, e.g. Lttng and dtrace, there are very powerful tools called end-to-end tracers that basically work tracing a request from top to bottom in distributed systems. In other words, it allows to log information of distributed system.

The example in [3] is the wikipedia, but any major platform nowadays is distributed in several places and could potentially use this tool.

An example of end-to-end tracer is X-trace[1], which was developed by Rodrigo Fonseca, and presented at his PhD Thesis and it’s available in his github account [2].

Currently there are several tools, in this so called end-to-end tracers but also techniques and tools to complement this, e.g. Pivot tracing technique.

This is clearly a hot-topic and has received for attention from several companies, e.g. Google and others.

I will be posting more about end-to-end tracers soon.

[1] http://xtrace.sourceforge.net/

[2] https://github.com/rfonseca