Explain what is meant by the term tracing in the context of system monitoring and debugging.

Tracing in system monitoring and debugging is the process of collecting and analyzing detailed information about the execution of a program or system, allowing to trace the sequence of function calls, operations, and events. The goal of tracing is to understand exactly how the application works, identify bottlenecks, errors, and causes of failures.

In distributed systems, tracing helps track the path of a request across different services, which is important for diagnosing performance issues and errors. Usually, special tools and standards are used for this, such as OpenTracing or OpenTelemetry.

Example: when tracing an HTTP request, you can see processing times on each service, database calls, and external API calls, which helps quickly localize the problem.