Setting Up Tracing in Elixir Applications with AppSignal

The article provides an in-depth look at tracing within Elixir applications, covering its definition, the benefits, and challenges associated with it. It specifically focuses on how to set up tracing using AppSignal in a Phoenix LiveView application that serves as a financial news tracker. The author explains the difference between application tracing and distributed tracing, emphasizing the role of tracing in performance analysis, debugging, and auditing. Starting with prerequisites, the article outlines the installation of the AppSignal package and follows through detailed setup configurations for Phoenix support. It further elaborates on key concepts of tracing, such as transactions and spans, trace context, and sampling, followed by practical implementation examples not only for web transactions but also for tracing external service calls. The write-up concludes with a call to action to leverage tracing for improved visibility and performance optimization in Elixir applications.