Distributed Tracing

Category: science

The method of tracking requests across multiple services to see the full "journey" of a single transaction.

Tracing is the "transaction path." It assigns a unique ID to a request. As that request hits five different microservices, the trace tracks exactly how long it spent in each one. It is how you find the "hidden" slow service that is killing your app’s performance.

Common Examples

• Distributed tracing revealed that our payment service was waiting for a slow internal database lookup, causing the overall transaction timeout.
• We rely on distributed tracing to untangle the complex web of calls within our microservices architecture during critical incident response.