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Interactive Explainer

Distributed Tracing with Istio

End-to-end request tracing across microservices using Jaeger or Zipkin, integrated automatically by Istio sidecars.

🎯Key Takeaways
Sidecars create spans automatically, but apps must propagate B3 headers
Sampling rate: default 1% in production (configurable)
Jaeger UI shows full request path and latency at each hop

Distributed Tracing with Istio

End-to-end request tracing across microservices using Jaeger or Zipkin, integrated automatically by Istio sidecars.

~1 min read
Be the first to complete!
What you'll learn
  • Sidecars create spans automatically, but apps must propagate B3 headers
  • Sampling rate: default 1% in production (configurable)
  • Jaeger UI shows full request path and latency at each hop

How Istio Tracing Works

Istio Envoy sidecars automatically generate span data for every request. For traces to propagate across services, your application must forward B3 trace headers (x-request-id, x-b3-traceid, x-b3-spanid, x-b3-parentspanid, x-b3-sampled). Traces are sent to Jaeger or Zipkin.

Key takeaways

  • Sidecars create spans automatically, but apps must propagate B3 headers
  • Sampling rate: default 1% in production (configurable)
  • Jaeger UI shows full request path and latency at each hop

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