When building modern software architectures there can be many moving parts that while adding to the flexibility of software, can also make them more complex than ever before. With software now being built in smaller, more discrete components, issues can occur at many different layers across the stack, making them more difficult to track down.

In this episode of Kongcast, I spoke with Chinmay Gaikwad, the tech evangelist at Epsagon, about distributed tracing and observability for microservices architectures. Check out the transcript and video from our conversation below, and be sure to subscribe to get email alerts for the latest new episodes.

The rise in digital transformation over the past few years means that more and more companies are adopting cloud native technologies. While these distributed architectures provide scalability and agility, they also increase complexity. As Arnal Dayaratna, research director in software development for IDC, writes, “One of the challenges faced by contemporary developers is the task of understanding applications that they may not have even developed or used .”

When working with Rookout customers, one of the most commonly heard requests we hear is a plea for “context”. When trying to debug a complex applications, setting a Non-Breaking Breakpoint and fetching a full view of local variables and stack trace is a necessary first step. But in a complex, distributed environment, this first step is not always enough.

Colin Hemmings, Senior Product Manager of Bitrise Trace shares his experience in mobile monitoring and its challenges in this behind-the-scenes interview.

While there’s room for debate in what constitutes sufficient monitoring for a mobile app, it’s no question that if you wait long enough for users to report issues, then soon you will have no users. For most mobile development teams, you are not measured against how many features you deliver or bugs you fix, but by how successful your app is and how much value it delivers to users. As a result, you need to know where the app is providing a subpar experience and why.

Trace is our new mobile monitoring add-on that has been in public beta since late February. It is also available to you if you have a Bitrise account, so if you want to dive into it, here's where you should start.

There is a great number of logging plugins for Kong, which might be enough for your needs. However, they have certain limitations: Most of them only work on HTTP/HTTPS traffic. They make sense in an API gateway scenario, with a single Kong cluster proxying traffic between consumers and services. Each log line will generally correspond to a request which is “independent” from the rest.