Monitoring Kubernetes Drupal Clusters using Distributed Tracing.

If you are hosting any Drupal sites on Kubernetes or are in the process of moving to a Kubernetes cluster infrastructure, this session is for you. As most of us have experienced already, debugging production Kubernetes clusters running Drupal can be a tremendously complex task leading to unplanned downtime, overhead and toil.

What is Distributed Tracing and why do we need it?

Distributed tracing points to strategies for watching requests as they spread through distributed systems like Kubernetes micro-services. It's an analytic procedure that uncovers how a lot of processes organize to deal with a singular user request.. A single trace ordinarily shows the flow for an individual transaction or request inside the application being checked, from the browser down through to the database and back. Distributed tracing does this by showing you the path a request follows as it travels through a distributed system.
While using the usual tracing tools like XHProf, eBPF, Strace or Sysdig will work with with a monolithic observability system, where we can see software requests end-to-end, making troubleshooting is easier and fast, such is not the case for a micro-services distributed system. In the "old world" tracing could be done directly on any operating system like Linux, but now Kubernetes could be seen as the "new operating system", on top of network connections and complex routing inside the cluster, for which you will need modern tools like Zipkin, Jaeger, Appdash, or similar. These modern tools will show you the spans of a request that are combined into a single distributed trace to give you a picture of an entire request.

Learning Objectives

At the end of this session, attendees will be able to have a better overview of In this session we will go over several disparate tracing components like trace ingest, trace storage, instrumentation of application and middleware, distributed context propagation and trace retrieval and visualization.

Target Audience

Developers, Systems Admins, DevOps practitioners who want to understand the landscape of tools available and anyone who hosts or wants to host Drupal on a distributed cluster technology like Kubernetes.

Prerequisites

Attendees will get the most out of this session by being familiar with best practices surrounding running Drupal on LAMP, cloud and Kubernetes. Whether you already have Drupal running on Kubernetes or are just getting started, this session is for you.

*Session Materials*