Regarding the interview question, "What is Link Tracing"?

How should we answer?

Hello everyone, I'm Mic, a Java programmer who has been working for 14 years

What is the interviewer looking for in this question?

Problem Analysis

Link tracing is a monitoring method in a distributed architecture.

For some large-scale distributed systems, a user's request may need to involve the flow of multiple subsystems.

And with the continuous growth of business, the calling relationship between services will become more and more complex.

In such a context, on the one hand, we need to understand the calling relationship of the entire request chain to locate performance problems.

On the other hand, it is necessary to display various system indicators from the whole to the part, and quickly realize fault location and recovery.

So there is a need for link tracking.

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The earliest link monitoring system is Google's Dapper. In 2010, Google released a paper to introduce the overall design of Dapper.

All link monitoring systems currently on the market are derived from its theoretical model.

Including Ali's Hawkeye, Dianping's cat, Twitter's Zipkin, etc.

With the full link monitoring tool, the following problems can be solved:

  • Request link tracking, quickly locate faults: You can quickly locate error information through the call chain combined with business logs.
  • Visualization: Each stage is time-consuming, and performance analysis is performed.
  • Dependency optimization: Availability of each call link, sorting out service dependencies, and optimization.
  • Data analysis, optimizing links: You can get the user's behavior path, and summarize and analyze it in many business scenarios.

Inspection target

The companies that investigate this issue are generally medium and large Internet companies with a certain scale.

Because the technical architecture of some small enterprises is not complicated, there is no need to do the design of link tracking, which is a bit of a waste of resources.

And the point of this question is generally not too in-depth, unless you are facing more senior job seekers, you may continue to understand the implementation principle of link tracking.

It is recommended that job seekers formulate this question clearly and concisely according to their own situation.

Expert:

Link tracking is a technology for visual monitoring of request links in a distributed architecture.

Its core purpose is to understand the request invocation behavior in the distributed system, so as to display various system indicators in detail from the whole to the part.

Quickly locate faults and shorten troubleshooting time.

Common link tracking tools include Zipkin, Skywalking, Cat, and Pinpoint.

However, link tracking is only one of the cores of distributed link monitoring tools. In addition, it also includes visualization, service dependency sorting, and data analysis capabilities.

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《Spring Cloud Alibaba 微服务原理与实战》、《Java并发编程深度理解及实战》作者。 咕泡教育联合创始人,12年开发架构经验,对分布式微服务、高并发领域有非常丰富的实战经验。