At Glitch we’ve recently completed a project to migrate to SLO-based alerts. It’s too early to tell if this has been a success or not, but in this post I’ll write about our motivation for going down this route, and give an introduction to all the concepts you need to know, should you want to give it a go as well.

Since most applications today are distributed in some fashion, monitoring their health and performance requires a new approach. Enter distributed tracing, a method of profiling and monitoring distributed applications, such as microservices and serverless.

There's just one problem: distributed tracing can be hard. But it doesn't have to be. In this book, Distributed tracing experts from Lightstep, Google, and Twitter, and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems share ways to more effectively build, operate, and understand your software.