Diagnosing latency with distributed tracing
WHAT IT TESTS: using traces to localize a bottleneck. OUTLINE: follow the trace ID across spans, compare per-span durations to find the slow hop, distinguish service time from network and queueing.
WHAT IT TESTS: a methodical trace-driven diagnosis. ANSWER OUTLINE: the sidecars emit a span per hop and stamp trace headers, but the application must forward those headers so spans link into one trace. Open a slow trace, view the waterfall, and find the span whose self time dominates; check whether the delay is in a service, a downstream call, or queueing. RED FLAG: looking only at cluster-wide latency averages, or assuming the mesh stitches a full trace without the app propagating the trace headers.
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- #service-mesh
- #observability
- #distributed-tracing
- #latency
- #istio
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