Distributed Tracing Patterns

Overview

Distributed tracing records the journey of a request across services as a tree of spans. Without proper instrumentation, diagnosing latency in a microservices system requires guesswork. Done poorly — missing context propagation, over-instrumentation, or span explosion — tracing creates noise and cost without insight.

When to use: Instrumenting a new service, reviewing tracing code, debugging latency across service boundaries, linking traces to metrics, or designing a sampling strategy for high-throughput systems.

Prerequisite skills: observability-patterns, microservices-resilience-patterns, performance-anti-patterns.

Quick Reference