Project SherlockEst. Knowledge

Paper

2015

Pivot Tracing: Dynamic Causal Monitoring for Distributed Systems

Jonathan Mace, Ryan Roelke & Rodrigo Fonseca

Lets operators define new cross-component metrics at runtime by piggybacking on causal tracing, instead of committing in advance to a fixed set of instrumented statistics.

Before you start

FreeAdvancedlink checked 17 Sept 2026

Read these first

Not a difficulty warning — a route. These are in the library too.

Dapper, a Large-Scale Distributed Systems Tracing InfrastructureBenjamin H. Sigelman et al., 2010Shows how to trace a request across hundreds of services with low overhead, and is the ancestor of every tracing tool since.

Filed under Distributed Systems in Computer Science.