Request Tracing
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
Request tracing follows a request's entire journey through your system, recording every service it touches and how long each step takes. It's like a GPS tracker for your API calls. When something's slow, tracing shows you exactly which service is the bottleneck.
Real Talk
Request tracing (distributed tracing) records the path of a request through multiple services, capturing timing, dependencies, and errors at each step. Each trace contains spans representing individual operations. Standards like OpenTelemetry and tools like Jaeger/Zipkin visualize trace data as waterfall diagrams for performance analysis.
When You'll Hear This
"The trace shows the payment service added 800ms of latency to the request." / "Enable request tracing before trying to optimize — measure first."
Related Terms
Correlation ID
A correlation ID is like a tracking number for a request as it bounces between microservices.
Distributed Tracing
Distributed tracing is request tracing's big brother — it works across multiple services, servers, and even data centers.
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.