EXIST: Enabling Extremely Efficient Intra-Service Tracing Observability in Datacenters
Xinkai Wang, Xiaofeng Hou, Chao Li, Yuancheng Li, Du Liu, Guoyao Xu, Guodong Yang, Liping Zhang, Yuemin Wu, Xiaopeng Yuan, Quan Chen, Minyi Guo · 2025
The complexity of online applications is rapidly increasing, bringing more sophisticated performance anomalies in today's cloud datacenter. To fully understand application behaviors, we should obtain both inter-service communication data via RPC-level tracing and intra-service execution traces via application-level tracing to precisely reason about event causality. However, the average time overhead of existing intra-service tracing schemes on the traced applications is generally about 5-10%, possibly reaching 18% in the worst case. To realize practical intra-service tracing in shared and stressed datacenters, one must achieve extreme tracing efficiency with an overhead at the per-mille level.