Distributed tracing is an essential tool for understanding application requests as they travel through a distributed system. While it is straightforward to use tracing in HTTP based protocols, how do you trace requests that use other protocols?
In this case study, we will walk through how our team injected trace contexts into SOCKS protocol requests by identifying unused fields in the request packet. You will get an overview of the SOCKS protocol and some of its use cases, as well as an introduction to the concept of Context Propagation and OpenTelemetry’s trace propagators. You will learn about the tradeoffs our team made to propagate traces by injecting them into inventive places in our network traffic, and be inspired to find workarounds to enable modern observability practices in all your systems.
In this case study, we will walk through how our team injected trace contexts into SOCKS protocol requests by identifying unused fields in the request packet. You will get an overview of the SOCKS protocol and some of its use cases, as well as an introduction to the concept of Context Propagation and OpenTelemetry’s trace propagators. You will learn about the tradeoffs our team made to propagate traces by injecting them into inventive places in our network traffic, and be inspired to find workarounds to enable modern observability practices in all your systems.
Dafydd Thomas
Grafana Labs
Dafydd its a staff software engineer at Grafana Labs, where he has spent the last four years helping to run Grafana at scale. He is currently the tech lead for Grafana Cloud's Private Data source Connect project, which helps customers securely query their private data sources.
Outside of work, he spends most of his time playing with his two young daughters. Otherwise he likes running around muddy fields with his dog.
Outside of work, he spends most of his time playing with his two young daughters. Otherwise he likes running around muddy fields with his dog.