Jaeger

Jaeger is an open source tool used for tracking the flow of requests through a distributed system. It provides developers with insights into the performance and behavior of their applications, enabling them to identify and troubleshoot issues. By using Jaeger, developers can visualize and analyze the flow of requests, making it easier to understand the interactions between different services and identify bottlenecks or latency issues.

For example, if you have a microservices-based e-commerce platform and want to understand the flow of a user's request as it goes through different services such as authentication, inventory management, and payment processing, Jaeger can help you visualize and trace the entire journey of the request. This can be invaluable in identifying performance issues or errors in the system.

For instance, you can use Jaeger with OpenTelemetry to instrument your code and start collecting trace data. Here's an example of how you can set up Jaeger with OpenTelemetry in a Node.js application:

const { NodeTracerProvider } = require('@opentelemetry/node');
const { JaegerExporter } = require('@opentelemetry/exporter-jaeger');

const provider = new NodeTracerProvider();
provider.addSpanProcessor(new SimpleSpanProcessor(new JaegerExporter()));
provider.register();

There are many other options for visualising distributed tracing data.