Distributed Tracing
Tracking a request as it flows through multiple services in a distributed system. Each service adds its trace, creating a full picture of the request journey.
What is Distributed Tracing?
Tracking a request as it flows through multiple services in a distributed system. Each service adds its trace, creating a full picture of the request journey.
Distributed Tracing is a intermediate-level concept that sits in the Observability & Monitoring area of system design. Engineers reach for it whenever they need to reason about real-world trade-offs in that space — not just for textbook correctness, but because real production systems at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Google make these decisions every day.
If you want to go deeper than this definition — with diagrams, code, and a quiz to lock it in — work through the "Distributed Tracing" lesson linked below. It walks through the why, the mechanism, the trade-offs, and how the giants actually use it in production.
Learn Distributed Tracing in depth
Full interactive lesson with diagrams, code examples, real-world references, and a quiz.
Open the Distributed Tracing lessonRelated lessons
Lessons that touch on Distributed Tracing as part of a larger topic.
Distributed Context Propagation
Passing trace context, baggage, and metadata across service boundaries, the glue of distributed tracing
intermediate · observability monitoring
Trace IDs
The unique identifier for a distributed trace, one ID that ties together every service a request touches
intermediate · observability monitoring
Span IDs
Individual operations within a trace, each span is one unit of work with a start time, duration, and parent
intermediate · observability monitoring
Jaeger
Uber's open-source distributed tracing system, built for microservices at massive scale
intermediate · observability monitoring
Zipkin
Twitter's original distributed tracing system, the pioneer that inspired modern tracing
intermediate · observability monitoring
See also
Related glossary terms you might want to look up next.
Microservices
An architecture where an application is split into small, independent services that communicate over the network. Each service owns its own data and can be deployed separately.
Health Check
An endpoint or mechanism that reports whether a service is running and healthy. Load balancers use health checks to route traffic away from unhealthy instances.