Distributed Tracing vs Synthetic Monitoring

Developers should learn and use distributed tracing when building or maintaining microservices-based applications, cloud-native systems, or any distributed architecture where requests span multiple services meets developers should use synthetic monitoring to ensure critical user journeys are functioning correctly and meeting performance benchmarks, especially for e-commerce sites, banking apps, or any service where downtime or slow performance directly impacts revenue or user trust. Here's our take.

Distributed Tracing

Nice Pick

Developers should learn and use distributed tracing when building or maintaining microservices-based applications, cloud-native systems, or any distributed architecture where requests span multiple services

Pros

• It is crucial for performance monitoring, troubleshooting latency issues, and ensuring reliability in production environments, as it provides end-to-end visibility into request flows and dependencies
• Related to: microservices, observability

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

Synthetic Monitoring

Developers should use synthetic monitoring to ensure critical user journeys are functioning correctly and meeting performance benchmarks, especially for e-commerce sites, banking apps, or any service where downtime or slow performance directly impacts revenue or user trust

Pros

• It is essential for pre-production testing, compliance monitoring, and detecting issues in third-party integrations or dependencies that might not be caught by traditional monitoring
• Related to: application-performance-monitoring, real-user-monitoring

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

The Verdict

These tools serve different purposes. Distributed Tracing is a concept while Synthetic Monitoring is a tool. We picked Distributed Tracing based on overall popularity, but your choice depends on what you're building.

The Bottom Line

Distributed Tracing wins

Based on overall popularity. Distributed Tracing is more widely used, but Synthetic Monitoring excels in its own space.