Distributed Tracing
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
Distributed tracing is request tracing's big brother — it works across multiple services, servers, and even data centers. It creates a tree of 'spans' showing every service call, database query, and external API hit. When your microservice architecture is slow, this is how you find out why.
Real Talk
Distributed tracing instruments applications to produce, collect, and analyze trace data across service boundaries. Each trace consists of hierarchical spans with timing, status, and metadata. It follows the W3C Trace Context standard for context propagation. Key components include instrumentation libraries, collectors, storage backends, and visualization UIs.
When You'll Hear This
"Distributed tracing revealed our auth service makes 3 unnecessary database calls per request." / "You can't run microservices in production without distributed tracing."
Related Terms
Jaeger
In a microservices system, a user request might touch 15 services before returning. When it's slow, which service is the culprit?
Observability
Observability is the ability to understand what's happening inside your system from the outside, using three types of data: metrics (numbers), logs (events...
OpenTelemetry
OpenTelemetry is the universal standard for collecting traces, metrics, and logs from your apps.
Zipkin
Zipkin is the older cousin of Jaeger — built by Twitter in 2012 when microservices were still called SOA.