Distributed Tracing: Use Cases, When It's Good, And When It's Overkill

Nobody has claimed this yet.

### What is the purpose of the post?
The purpose of this HIGHLY OPINIONATED post is to unpack what people are asking for when they say they want distributed tracing and why they may be able to get what they need more simply and easily.

### What should it talk about?
The post will define distributed tracing and then break down what people are asking for when they say they need distributed tracing. More specifically, whether they need tracing for network topology graphs, for performance measurement and monitoring, or for audit purposes.

If this means they are asking for network topologies, it is a relatively simply thing to achieve and one that does not require inject tracer elements on every inch of your kubernetes real estate.

If this means measuring performance and monitoring, distributed tracing may actually be a less accurate method for monitoring than direct measurements that are not so sparsely sampled (and btw are far less expensive in terms of resources and hassles)

Lastly, we will consider distributed tracing for audit purpose and super complex microservice architectures - in which case, distributed tracing is a perfect use case.

### Who is the target audience?

* [x] Architect
* [x] SRE
* [ ] Developers

### Are there any assets?
Not required.

### What are the dependencies?
None.

### Relevant Examples / References

https://blog.buoyant.io/2016/05/17/distributed-tracing-for-polyglot-microservices/
https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/
https://medium.com/opentracing/distributed-tracing-in-10-minutes-51b378ee40f1

Start by reviewing the three linked references and the issue's requested topics: definitions, topology, performance monitoring, audit use cases, and when tracing is overkill. Done means a highly opinionated post for architects and SREs that addresses those comparisons and explains when distributed tracing is appropriate.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.