You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
Distributed tracing follows a single request as it travels through multiple services in a distributed system. It reveals the path, timing, and dependencies of each operation, making it indispensable for debugging latency issues and understanding service interactions.
In a monolithic application, a stack trace shows you exactly where an error occurred. In a microservices architecture, a single user request might traverse 10 or more services:
User → API Gateway → Auth Service → Order Service → Payment Service → Notification Service
↓
Inventory Service → Database
Without tracing, answering "why was this request slow?" requires correlating logs from every service manually. Tracing solves this by connecting all operations into a single, visual timeline.
A trace represents the entire journey of a request through the system. It is identified by a unique trace ID.
A span represents a single operation within a trace — an HTTP request, a database query, a function call. Each span has:
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.