Distributed Tracing

Distributed tracing is a method used to profile and monitor complex distributed software systems. It helps pinpoint where failures or performance issues occur in microservices architectures where requests span multiple services.

Distributed tracing works by assigning each external request a unique ID, called a trace ID. This ID is passed along with the request as it travels through the system. Each service logs information like timestamps and operation details and associates it with the trace ID. If a problem occurs, the full lifecycle of a request can be reconstructed end-to-end by extracting and correlating all the information linked to the trace ID across all services. For example, if a request is slow, distributed tracing allows you to see exactly which service or call in the chain is causing the bottleneck. This provides observability into distributed systems and makes debugging much faster and easier. Popular distributed tracing tools include Jaeger, Zipkin and Lightstep.