THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF EVENT TRACKING IN DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS

Abstract

The article explores the theoretical foundations and key aspects of event tracking in distributed systems, which is becoming particularly relevant in the context of the rapid development of microservice architecture. It analyzes the main characteristics and features of microservice architecture, including its advantages and disadvantages compared to monolithic architecture. It has been determined that the microservice approach, despite its advantages in terms of development flexibility and scalability, creates additional challenges in the context of monitoring and event tracking due to the system's distributed nature. The key concepts of event tracking systems are revealed, including the concept of "span" as a basic unit of tracking, "trace" for tracking the complete request path, "baggage" for transmitting metadata between services, "tags" for providing context, and "sampling" for optimizing system load. Different approaches to sampling are analyzed in detail, including "head-based" and "tailbased" methods, as well as their features and application cases. The architecture of modern event tracking systems, which consists of five main components: middleware, context propagation mechanism, trace storage system, data collector, and analysis interface, is studied. Particular attention is paid to context propagation mechanisms and their role in ensuring effective event tracking in distributed systems. It has been determined that an effective event-tracking system should ensure minimal impact on the performance of core business processes, which is achieved through asynchronous processing of monitoring data and optimized mechanisms for their collection and storage. The research results have practical significance for software developers and architects working with microservice architectures, which require practical tools for monitoring and diagnosing distributed systems.