As monolithic applications decompose into dozens of decoupled microservices, centralized log aggregation tools become inadequate for pinpointing why an end-user request incurred a 3-second latency spike. Distributed Tracing provides the missing visibility.

1. Trace, Span, and W3C Context Propagation

  • Trace: The complete directed acyclic graph (DAG) of spans representing an end-to-end user request lifecycle across the entire fleet.
  • Span: A contiguous unit of work (e.g. an SQL query, RPC invocation, or cache lookup) annotated with duration and metadata attributes.
  • W3C Traceparent Header: Standardized traceparent: 00-4bf92f3577b34da6a3ce929d0e0e4736-00f067aa0ba902b7-01 header propagated across network boundaries.
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