Monitoring and troubleshooting distributed systems like those built with microservices is challenging. Traditional monitoring tools struggle with distributed systems as they were made for a single component. Distributed tracing solves this problem by tracking a transaction across components.
In this article, we will implement distributed tracing for a nodejs application based on microservices architecture. To implement distributed tracing, we will be using open-source solutions - SigNoz and OpenTelemetry, so you can easily follow the tutorial.
Nestjs is a Nodejs framework for building scalable server-side applications with typescript. It makes use of frameworks like Express and Fastify to enable rapid development. It has gained wide popularity in recent times, and many applications are making use of the Nestjs framework.
Nodejs is a popular Javascript runtime environment that executes Javascript code outside of a web browser. Express is the most popular web frameworks that sits on top of Nodejs and adds functionalities like middleware, routing, etc. to Nodejs.
OpenTelemetry can auto-instrument many common modules for a Javascript application. The telemetry data captured can then be sent to SigNoz for analysis and visualization.