This paper from Google describes the design and implementation of Dapper, Google’s system for tracing requests in distributed systems. The authors explain why they chose a distributed tracing system, the design decisions they made for Dapper, and how the Dapper infrastructure has been used in practice. They also discuss the impact of Dapper on application performance and their strategies for mitigating the overhead. The paper emphasizes the importance of application-level transparency for distributed tracing systems.

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/papers/dapper-2010-1.pdf