Tracing
In plain terms
Following a single request as it travels through many services.
Going deeper
Distributed tracing tags a request with an ID and records each hop's timing, revealing where latency or errors occur across microservices. It's essential for debugging complex systems.
Under the hood
Propagates a trace/span context across service boundaries; sampling balances detail vs. overhead, and standards like OpenTelemetry unify instrumentation.
Examples
Jaeger, Zipkin, OpenTelemetry, AWS X-Ray, latency waterfalls.
Think of it like...
Like a package tracking number that shows every warehouse and truck a parcel passed through, so you can see exactly where it got delayed.