Introduction

In a microservice landscape you see, in contrast to a traditional monoliths, that each application consists of several separate services. These services have their own life cycle and technology stack, configuration and logging. Specially the latter is difficult for (support) personnel to follow a single user throughout the landscape. This is where log correlation comes in. The idea is that a TraceID is generated when a user creates a request on the landscape (via browser or external service). This TraceID is placed on the HTTP request and follows the activity until a response is generated. Each service which has been touched this manner generates a new spanID and this is also sent. The result is that request is logged with both the TraceID and SpanID and a 3rd party central logging tool such as Splunk or ELK can correlate these IDs. A user then has a single point for looking at the complete logging of a single user throughout all applications. Another advantage is that performance problems can also be detected in this manner.

Value

The value of this functionality is:

• to be able to know what happened for a specific user throughout all applications in the entire landscape in order to understand or replay the path taken
• to be able to see how long some steps took in order to check the performance
• to be able to trace all records of a specific user in order to remove those (to comply with the GDPR).

Configuration

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