Skua: Extending Distributed-Systems Tracing into the Linux Kernel
Channel: DevConf
Date: 25/02/2019

Modern applications are often architected as a sprawling fleet of microservices. While this does have benefits, it also makes it incredibly difficult for developers to diagnose issues with their applications. Many tools have been developed to trace applications by recording timing data and resolving service dependencies. However, these tools miss an important part of application performance: the kernel. We present Skua, a modified suite of tracing utilities that gains insight into both application- and kernel-level behavior. Logging information produced by LTTng is augmented with tracing context information and integrated into the existing distributed-systems tracing framework provided by Jaeger.