Distributed Tracing in Microservices with Kotlin and Docker

As microservice architectures grow, tracking requests across multiple services becomes a major challenge. Understanding how to trace, monitor, and debug these distributed systems is essential for building reliable, production-grade applications. In this text-based course, you will learn the foundational concepts of distributed tracing and how to implement them in a microservices environment. You will explore how to set up trace propagation, collect observability data, and manage service interactions using Kotlin and Docker. By studying the structured explanations and code examples, you will gain a clear mental model of how requests flow through complex systems. What you'll learn: - Understand the core principles of distributed tracing and observability in microservice architectures. - Configure trace context propagation across multiple services using Kotlin. - Containerize services and tracing tools using Docker for consistent development environments. - Implement OpenTelemetry standards to collect and export spans and traces. - Analyze trace data to identify latency bottlenecks and debug failures in complex call chains. - Apply structured logging practices that correlate logs with specific trace IDs. The course begins with the essential theory of observability, request lifecycles, and tracing terminology. You will then progress through step-by-step written guides to understand how to build, containerize, and trace a multi-service Kotlin application. This course is designed for software developers, backend engineers, and system architects who are new to distributed tracing and want to understand how to monitor microservices. No prior experience with tracing tools is required, though a basic familiarity with Kotlin and container concepts is helpful. Start reading today to master the fundamentals of observability and keep your microservices reliable.