heckj/distributedtracer

Seeing it

To spin up a Jaeger trace collector:

docker-compose up -d

Run the tests from this package to generate a few tests:

swift test

Open up a browser to see any traces generated to http://localhost:16686/, which accesses the Jaeger running in Docker.

Possible Future Work

I have some hare-brained ideas about using this further, and definitely trying it out with swift-testing once that gets a little easier. In general, I would really like to be able to both export spans from tests, and - in the case of an integration test specifically - be able to retrieve them after the actions of the integration test(s) are complete in order to assert/validation against them.

The other possibility that seems super-interesting to me is enabling tracing from Apple native-platform apps (iOS, macOS, etc) that works in concert with back-end tracing. There are significantly more challenges there, among which are:

• making sure there's some representation of privacy if you use such a library - privacy manifests, etc
• coordinating capturing traces with backend infrastructure (in large environments, there are too many traces to rationally keep, so you sample them - but ideally you want the samples to be matched between these disparate tracing collection sites. The idea is talked about in distributed tracing circles as 'tail sampling')
• tuning the amount of data captured, and enabling a transport to get them to your back-end infrastructure (basically, don't bloat memory and die, and try to reliably transmit this stuff so you don't loose "the good stuff")
• coming up with an way to ingest into your back-end services in a way that doesn't open up a monstrous security hole that would allow someone to denial-of-service your diagnostics/observability infrastructure.

If any of this sounds super-interesting to you, let me know - or jump in and contribute here if you like. And if you want something like this for your company... let me know. I'm available freelance, and we can work out a means to add the feature or capabilities to this (or other) open-source projects to support the things we like to use.

Package Metadata

Repository: heckj/distributedtracer

Default branch: main

README: README.md