ZeroTracer: In-Band eBPF-Based Trace Generator With Zero Instrumentation for Microservice Systems
Wanqi Yang, Pengfei Chen, Kai Liu, Huxing Zhang · IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems · 2025
Microservice enables agility in modern cloud-native applications but introduces challenges in fault troubleshooting due to its complex service coordination and cooperation. To tackle these challenges, distributed tracing has emerged for end-to-end request tracing and system understanding. However, existing tracing solutions often suffer from code instrumentation, trace loss and inaccuracy. To overcome these limitations, we introduce ZeroTracer, an in-kernel online distributed tracing system equipped with an eBPF-based (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) trace generator. ZeroTracer tailors for tracking HTTP requests due to its popularity in microservice systems. In our evaluations, ZeroTracer achieves remarkable trace accuracy (i.e., over 91%) and maintains stable performance under different workload concurrency. Moreover, ZeroTracer outperforms other non-invasive approaches which fail to reconcile accurate request causality. Notably, ZeroTracer effectively tracks end-to-end requests in multi-threaded microservice applications, which is absent in existing invasive distributed tracing systems with third-party library instrumentation. Moreover, ZeroTracer introduces a negligible overhead, with latency increasing by only 0.5%–1.2% and a modest 3%–5.8% increase in CPU and memory consumption.