Achieving End-to-end Visibility into Complex Event-sourcing Transactions Using Distributed Tracing

Event-sourcing systems usage like Kafka is growing rapidly among Node.js applications. Building systems around an event-driven architecture simplifies horizontal scalability in distributed computing models and makes them more resilient to failure. With these advantages, we face new challenges - how to get visibility into these complex processes.

Event-driven architecture is async by nature. Tracking the communication between different components is both extremely difficult and important when debugging or figuring out bottlenecks in the system.

In this talk, I will present ways to achieve end-to-end and granular visibility into complex event-sourcing transactions using distributed tracing. I will use open-source tools like OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, and Zipkin to showcase a complex Node.js system using Kafka.