Who this book is for
It is my hope that this book may be useful to a wide range of audiences, from beginners who know very little about distributed tracing to active practitioners who are looking to expand their knowledge and find ways to extract more value from their tracing platforms. Different parts of the book may be of interest to these groups of readers:
- Application developers, SREs, and DevOps, who are the end users of distributed tracing. This group is generally less interested in how tracing infrastructure and instrumentation work; they are more interested in what the technology can do for their day-to-day work. The book provides many examples of the benefits of distributed tracing, from the simplest use cases of "let's look at one trace and see what performance problems it can help us discover" to advanced data mining scenarios of "how do we process that vast amounts of tracing data we are collecting and gain insights into the behaviors of our distributed system that cannot be inferred from individual transactions."
- Framework and infrastructure developers, who are building libraries and tools for other developers and want to make those tools observable through integration with distributed tracing. This group would benefit from the thorough review of the instrumentation techniques and patterns, and the discussion of the emerging standards for tracing.
- Engineering managers and executives, who have the "power of the purse" and need to understand and be convinced of the value that tracing provides to an organization.
- Finally, the tracing teams, that is, engineers tasked with building, deploying, and operating tracing infrastructure in an organization. This group must deal with many challenges, both technical and organizational, if it wants to scale its technology and its own efforts to amplify the impact of tracing on the organization at large.
