Advanced · Lab nights · 5 weeks
Tracing clinics for cross-service mysteries
Follow requests across polyglot services without drowning in span noise.
Tracing tools overflow with data unless you curate conventions. This lab series teaches attribute vocabularies, tail sampling strategies, and debugging narratives that help juniors contribute during incidents. You will stitch a fictional commerce stack with deliberate propagation bugs.
What is inside
- Semantic conventions workshop
- Tail sampling math with spreadsheet models
- Span budgets for high-throughput endpoints
- Cross-team contracts for baggage fields
- Incident storytelling using trace screenshots
- Mentor-reviewed debugging journal
- Optional deep dive on exemplars
Outcomes
- Ship a tracing dictionary your org can paste into docs
- Tune sampling once with mentor sign-off
- Tell a five-minute incident story using trace evidence only
Facilitator
Portrait placeholder for Ethan Zhao
Ethan Zhao
Observability engineer who contributed to internal tracing standards for a regional super-app.
Tuition reference: SGD 1,680 · schedule Thu labs · async briefs Mon · track Deep systems
Questions cohorts ask
Notes from participants
“Span budget worksheet caught three noisy endpoints we had ignored because dashboards looked “fine”.”Sofia · Backend engineer