Design a Distributed Tracing System · System Design Interview

Design a Distributed Tracing SystemDesign the system that lets an engineer see one request’s path through dozens of services, in the order it happened and how long each hop took.What it has to do

Every service a request passes through records a span, and the spans join into one trace

An engineer can look up a trace by its id and see it as a waterfall of spans

Only a sample of requests are traced, so tracing does not multiply the fleet’s cost

Scale

Requests per second across the fleet: 5 million

Spans ingested per second: 800,000

Out of scope

Metrics and alerting

Log storage and search

Instrumenting application code by hand

The visualisation UI

Practise this challengeAll system design challenges

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