The shift from monolithic applications to microservices led to many new challenges we haven’t had before. Especially analyzing problems and tracking down erroneous components in a distributed system has become much more difficult as slicing and decoupling applications advances. We now have to answer questions like: How do we find out which services were involved when processing a specific request and how long did it take to respond? How do we figure out which service is causing a request to fail and why? These issues are addressed by distributed tracing tools like Zipkin, Jaeger, OpenTracing and OpenCensus. But how can we leverage the data we are gathering using such tools to gain new insights into our business processes instead of just focussing on the technical aspects?

In this talk, we will give an introduction to distributed tracing focussing on the OpenTracing ecosystem, how it compares to similar tools and how you can benefit from using such tools. We will also show how you can take distributed tracing to the next level and turn it into distributed business tracing. We will use practical examples to show how this has changed our organization.