The currently available techniques and tools for software testing and troubleshooting are being found obsolete and incompetent, especially for microservice-based applications. As we move from the monolithic era to the promising microservices era, there is a need for a bunch of versatile tools for checking services in isolation as well as microservice-centric applications in totality. As individual services cannot give the big picture, the new-generation testing and debugging tools have to have the distinct capability to do the same at the application level. That is, the tools must present the complete picture of application performance along with how the application delivers its functionality.

Therefore, this pattern recommends the leverage of a distributed tracing tool, which can track every request and capture the associated data as it scans through multiple microservices. The tool then aggregates the collected details to give an integrated and 360-degree view of the application behavior and performance. The solution approach is to instrument each microservice with code that assigns each external request a unique ID. The code enables to pass the ID to all the services involved in handling the request, to include the ID in all the log messages, and finally to record the value-adding information such as start and end times. This pattern enables developers to see how an individual request is being handled by searching across aggregated logs.