Distributed Tracing: Following Requests Across Services
Issue #64: System Design Interview Roadmap
👋 Welcome back,
When your e-commerce platform suddenly starts dropping orders during Black Friday, and your monitoring dashboards show green across all individual services, you're facing the distributed systems equivalent of a perfect crime. Each microservice appears healthy in isolation, yet somewhere in the maze of service-to-service calls, customer requests are vanishing into the digital void.
This scenario haunts engineering teams worldwide because traditional monitoring tools were built for monolithic architectures. They excel at telling you that Service A is healthy and Service B is responding, but they remain silent about what happens when Service A calls Service B, which calls Service C, and somewhere in that chain, a critical business transaction fails.
Today, we'll master distributed tracing - your detective toolkit for these complex system mysteries. More importantly, you'll build a complete production-grade demo that showcases patterns used by Netflix, Google, and Amazon.
🎯 What You'll Learn Today
By the end of this newsletter, you'll have:
✅ Deep understanding of distributed tracing concepts and patterns
✅ Production-ready implementation with 5 microservices
✅ Hands-on experience with OpenTelemetry and Jaeger
✅ Real debugging skills for distributed system failures
✅ Enterprise patterns used by FAANG companies