Distributed Tracing
Distributed tracing follows a single request as it moves through multiple services in a distributed system, recording timing and metadata at each hop. It reveals where latency accumulates and which service interactions cause failures in microservice architectures.
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Intro
Distributed Tracing
A request can cross an API gateway, several services, a queue, and a database. A dashboard may tell you the request was slow. A distributed trace shows the path it took and where the time went.
Distributed tracing records one request as a trace. Each unit of work becomes a span. Parent and child relationships connect those spans into a causal story across process and network boundaries.
Why tracing exists
Logs describe events inside individual components. Metrics summarize behavior across many operations. Neither signal automatically preserves one request's path through a distributed system.
Tracing adds that request-level structure. You can use it to:
- locate the service or dependency that added latency;
- see which branch returned an error;
- understand retries, fan-out, and asynchronous work;
- correlate a trace with logs that carry its trace ID;
- compare the observed path with the architecture you intended.
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Sources
- https://opentelemetry.io/docs/concepts/observability-primer/
Supports
- Distributed traces as the path of one request through services
- Traces composed of root and child spans and waterfall visualization
- Distinctions and correlation among traces, metrics, and logs
- Rationale for the first link and quiz questions 01 and 09
- https://opentelemetry.io/docs/concepts/signals/traces/
Supports
- Span fields, nesting, span context, attributes, events, links, status, and kinds
- Tracers creating spans and exporters sending traces to consumers
- Trace exporters sending to standard output, the Collector, or backends
- Rationale for the second link and quiz question 02
- https://opentelemetry.io/docs/concepts/context-propagation/
Supports
- Context propagation across process and network boundaries
- Injection into and extraction from carriers
- Trace and parent identifiers joining downstream spans to one trace
- OpenTelemetry default use of W3C Trace Context
- Rationale for the third link and quiz questions 03 and 06
- https://www.w3.org/TR/trace-context/
Supports
- Traceparent and tracestate processing and forwarding
- Traceparent version, trace identifier, parent identifier, and flags
- Tracestate as vendor-specific trace information
- Privacy and security constraints for propagated headers
- Rationale for the fourth link and quiz question 04
- https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otel/trace/api/
Supports
- SpanContext identifiers, flags, state, and immutability
- Span fields, parent selection, links, events, status, and span kinds
- Stable, general span naming instead of instance-specific names
- Rationale for the fifth link and quiz questions 05 and 08
- https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otel/trace/sdk/
Supports
- Sampling as control of tracing noise and overhead
- Sampling decisions, processors, simple and batch processing, exporters, and queue limits
- Out-of-process processing in the OpenTelemetry Collector
- Rationale for the sixth link and quiz question 07
- https://opentelemetry.io/docs/collector/
Supports
- Collector as a vendor-neutral proxy for receiving, processing, and exporting telemetry
- Rationale for the seventh link