Building Netflix’s Distributed Tracing Infrastructure

This post details the design and implementation of Netflix's distributed tracing infrastructure, which powers troubleshooting tools like Edgar. It covers trace instrumentation using Open-Zipkin's B3 HTTP header propagation, a hybrid head-based sampling approach for trace data collection, and stream processing using Mantis for ingesting and processing traces. The infrastructure stores traces in Cassandra and aims to provide engineers with service topology, retry/error tags, and latency measurements for all service calls to reconstruct and diagnose streaming session failures.