APM Distributed Tracing in a non Kubernetes micro-services architecture

[byoungman (Bill Youngman)]

I have a quick question regarding APM Distributed Tracing.

In the documentation I see references to micro-services but we are in a transition period going from a 'classic' non micro-service architecture to a kubernetes micro-service architecture so we still have quite a few servers that are servicing our core business.

So my question would be can APM Distributed Tracing support tracing when the 'service' is actually a physical server sending traffic through load balancers and other physical servers.

Thanks,
Bill Youngman

[marclop (Marc Lopez Rubio)]

Distributed Tracing will only work when all services are propagating the necessary HTTP (or other transports) downstream to the other services they call. We have a dedicated page in our documentation explaining Distributed Tracing.

For distributed tracing to work in your scenario, you'll need to ensure that the load balancer that you're using in between the service communication forwards all the headers that contain the trace context, in the picture below, the load balancer would be the "Middleware" bit.

Let me know if this helps.