The Design And Implementation Of Distributed Tracing System

With the growing number of Internet users,Internet services require higher and higher scalability,availability and modifiability,hence microservice architecture has sprung up in Internet application development domain.Microservices are suites of inde-pendently deployable services,which communicate with each other via Internet.This kind of architecture can fulfill the requirement of high scalability,availability and modifiability,but in another way,microservices introduces the high complexity of topology which causes the difficulty of trouble shooting and performance analysis.We design and im-plement a distributed tracing system to address this problem.By reviewing the past research work and existing tracing systems,we compare the category of tracing systems and demonstrate mainstream solution of tracing system.Considering the background of developing Internet applications,we believe the tracing system based on annotation is more suitable for tracing microservices.This thesis introduces Alipay's distributed tracing system called CIoudAtlas.By in-strumenting middleware,containers and frameworks,CloudAtlas can record tracing in-formation in the form of logs.Then log agents collect and publish log into message pipe-line,a consumer called Loglndexer consumes logs and send logs to ElasticSearch clus-ters.When users search traces,tracing logs are processed and structured by backend,then structured tracing information are rendered by frontend in four different views.CloudAtlas has been used in productive environment,which supports stable opera-tion of many Alipay's products.Tracing information can help developers debug and ana-lyze performance of distributed applications.Complete tracing information can help novice understand topology of the whole architecture and the role of service he or she will maintain.According to the statistics of CloudAtlas which deployed in Alipay,tens of thousands trace searches are executed every day by developers.