Distributed Tracing For Unified Diagnostic And Business Insights
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Solution Overview
Problem
Distributed systems with microservices architectures face challenges in identifying and analyzing issues across multiple interconnected services, particularly in understanding user journeys, due to complexity and the need for separate tools to collect diagnostic and user-specific transaction information, which adds unnecessary complexity.
Innovation Solution
Implement distributed tracing techniques that generate trace data for user journeys, incorporating both diagnostic and user-specific transaction information, using a code wrapper to collect data efficiently without additional tools, enabling identification of issues and improving user experiences.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If separate tools are used to collect diagnostic information and user-specific transaction information, then measurement precision is improved, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent combines diagnostic information collection and user-specific transaction information collection into a single distributed tracing system. The tracing system generates trace data that includes both types of information through integrated sampling and collection mechanisms, eliminating the need for separate tools and reducing system complexity while maintaining comprehensive measurement precision.
Solution Approach 2:
The distributed tracing system is designed to perform multiple functions: it collects diagnostic information about service performance, gathers user-specific transaction details, and provides contextual information about user journeys. This multi-functional approach allows a single system to replace multiple specialized tools, reducing complexity while maintaining the precision of information collection.
2Loss of information
If distributed tracing is implemented to understand user journeys, then information completeness is improved, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The tracing system segments user journeys into discrete spans, where each span represents a specific service or operation within the journey. This segmentation allows the system to track and collect comprehensive information about each component of the user journey while maintaining manageable complexity through modular, incremental data collection at each segment level.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary sampling and contextualization of trace data as it is generated, rather than attempting to process all raw data simultaneously. By pre-processing and structuring information during the tracing operation itself, the system maintains information completeness while reducing the complexity of subsequent analysis and storage operations.
Data Source
AI summary
Methods, systems, and devices are described. A user journey may be initiated by a user device, and a trace may be generated for the user journey. The trace may include one or more spans that each correspond to at least one service of a set of services that provide functionality to the user journey (e.g., as components of an application). Based on the generated trace including the one or more spans, both diagnostic information and user-specific transaction information may be collected for the user journey. For example, the diagnostic information may include information associated with a service (e.g., how long the service took to complete) and the user-specific transaction information may include information related to the user, such as a location of the user, a type of device used for a transaction, among other examples. The diagnostic information and user-specific transaction information may be stored and processed by a system.