Monitoring and logging are very important for any enterprise application, especially when we are dealing with a microservices-based distributed application with the involvement of several technologies. But logging and monitoring for individual microservices-based applications are very challenging due to the distributed behavior of the application's deployment. In a distributed application, several microservices are running together on several machines, so logs generated by different microservices are very difficult to trace end-to-end transactions.

In this chapter, we will elaborate on some of the best practices in building distributed systems and on performance monitoring for production-ready services. We will introduce log aggregation using the Elasticsearch/Logstash/Kibana stack for distributed applications.

By the end of this chapter, you will have a better understanding of how to monitor a distributed system and how to aggregate distributed logs generated by individual microservices of a distributed application.

This chapter will cover the following topic:

• Monitoring containers
• Logging challenges in the microservices architecture
• Centralized logging for microservices
• Log aggregation using the ELK stack
• Request tracing using Sleuth
• Request tracing using Zipkin