Distributed tracing can be very helpful when investigating production issues, especially in micro-services environments, where we have many small services running and it’s often difficult to pinpoint the cause/consequence relationship of failures or performance problems. OpenTelemetry already provides agents and SDKs that allows us to instrument our applications and generate distributed traces, however this talk focuses on approaches to generating distributed traces with eBPF by making zero code or configuration changes to the application stack.

We’ll discuss approaches on tracking server/client context in web services with eBPF and how we can propagate this context in some programming languages/frameworks. We’ll also focus on the challenges and approaches to implementing context tracking and propagation with eBPF to protocols other than HTTP.