Scalable Distributed Tracing System Design

Distributed Tracing System Design

Design a high-scale distributed tracing system for a global microservices architecture. The system must support tracing requests across thousands of services, handle billions of spans daily with minimal application-side overhead, and provide sub-minute visibility for root-cause analysis. Address how you would handle data ingestion bursts, efficient storage for search, and the trade-offs between different sampling strategies to manage cost and observability value.
OpenTelemetryKafkaElasticSearchgRPCB3 PropagationW3C Trace ContextSidecar PatternNoSQL
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Scalable Distributed Tracing System Design

Design a high-throughput distributed tracing system capable of capturing, storing, and visualizing service request flows across thousands of microservices. The system must handle over 1 million spans per second with minimal impact on application performance. Address the challenges of non-blocking data collection, efficient storage for long-term retention versus short-term search, and how to handle trace reconstruction across heterogeneous service environments. Discuss your strategy for sampling, search indexing, and ensuring the system remains reliable during massive traffic spikes.
gRPCKafkaCassandraElasticSearchW3C Trace ContextSidecar PatternNoSQL
00
Read
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