Learn By Doing: Advanced AIOps - Distributed Tracing and Root Cause Analysis

As modern systems evolve into sprawling microservice ecosystems, troubleshooting becomes exponentially more complex. This immersive course gives you the practical skills and deep technical insight needed to navigate that complexity with confidence.

Designed for professionals who want to master modern cloud-native diagnostics, this course goes far beyond traditional monitoring. You’ll learn how distributed tracing provides the full end-to-end visibility essential for pinpointing issues in today’s highly decoupled architectures. Think of it as the MRI of your distributed system - revealing causal relationships, latency bottlenecks, and hidden failure points that logs and metrics alone can never expose.

Through guided labs, real-world scenarios, and hands-on instrumentation, you’ll build the expertise to apply AIOps principles where they matter most: automated, accurate root cause analysis (RCA) in complex, distributed environments. By the end, you’ll know how to generate, collect, visualize, and interpret traces to diagnose problems with precision - and to correlate them with logs and metrics for truly holistic observability.

Labs Overview:

1. The Challenge of Microservices & The Rise of Distributed Tracing

• Understand why microservice architectures break traditional monitoring approaches such as logs and metrics.
• Learn how request context gets lost as calls hop across multiple independent services, making troubleshooting slow and ambiguous.
• Discover how distributed tracing restores end-to-end visibility, revealing the full journey of a request across all services.
• Get introduced to OpenTelemetry as the industry-standard, vendor-neutral framework for generating, collecting, and exporting trace data.

2. Installing the OpenTelemetry Collector

• Understand the role of the OpenTelemetry Collector as a standalone, vendor-neutral telemetry service.
• Install the Collector Contrib distribution and verify that it’s correctly set up in your environment.
• Learn the basic structure of a Collector configuration, including receivers, processors, and exporters.
• Run the Collector and explore its startup logs to confirm active components, listening ports, and overall runtime behavior.

3. Instrumenting Applications with OpenTelemetry

• Learn how applications generate telemetry and why instrumentation is required for producing traces.
• Enable auto-instrumentation for Java and Python.
• Use the OpenTelemetry Java agent and Python instrumentation tools to automatically capture spans from common frameworks and libraries.
• Configure applications to export trace data over OTLP directly to the Collector you installed earlier.
• Run instrumented services and verify that traces are being produced.

4. Visualizing Traces with Jaeger

• Learn what Jaeger is and why it provides a far better visualization experience than raw Collector logs.
• Install and run Jaeger All-In-One, giving you a full tracing backend and UI in a single process.
• Configure the OpenTelemetry Collector to export traces to Jaeger using OTLP.
• Access the Jaeger UI to prepare for exploring traces.

5. Practical Root Cause Analysis with Distributed Traces

• Learn how to interpret traces and spans in Jaeger to understand system behavior and request flows.
• Identify performance bottlenecks by analyzing trace timelines, critical paths, and long-running spans.
• Understand how latency propagates across services and how upstream/downstream dependencies affect request performance.
• Apply a step-by-step workflow to pinpoint root causes of slow requests, failures, and inefficient service interactions.

By the end of this course, you’ll have the confidence and hands-on expertise to instrument services, collect telemetry, visualize traces, and perform real root cause analysis across complex distributed systems. You’ll be equipped with practical skills in OpenTelemetry, the Collector, and Jaeger - empowering you to diagnose issues faster, improve service reliability, and elevate your observability practices. Jumpstart your journey into modern AIOps with us and transform the way you understand and troubleshoot cloud-native applications!