DevOps
What is Distributed Tracing?
Tracking a single request as it flows through multiple services, recording timing for each hop to pinpoint latency and failures.
Definition
Distributed tracing follows one request across every service it touches. Each unit of work becomes a span carrying start time, duration, and metadata; spans share a trace ID propagated via headers like W3C traceparent, and together they form a tree showing exactly where time was spent. When a checkout takes four seconds, the trace reveals whether the culprit is the payment service, a slow SQL query, or a retry storm. OpenTelemetry is the instrumentation standard, with Jaeger, Zipkin, Tempo, and Datadog APM as common backends. Sampling keeps overhead and storage manageable.