What is distributed tracing in microservices?
WHAT IT TESTS: observability across service boundaries. OUTLINE: a trace is a tree of spans tied by trace and span IDs, propagated via headers like W3C traceparent. RED FLAG: confusing tracing with plain logging or metrics.
WHAT IT TESTS: whether you can debug latency and failures across many services. ANSWER OUTLINE: a trace represents one request as a tree of timed spans sharing a trace ID; each call adds a child span with a parent span ID; context propagates through headers, typically W3C traceparent or B3, injected on outbound calls and extracted on inbound. RED FLAG: treating tracing as just structured logging, ignoring context propagation, or assuming the framework wires it up automatically without instrumentation.
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- #observability
- #tracing
- #microservices
- #opentelemetry
- #spans
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