Have you heard about distributed tracing?

Yes, distributed tracing is a method of tracking and analyzing requests passing through distributed systems and microservices. It allows you to see the full request path, the execution time of each step, and identify bottlenecks or errors.

Main components:

• Traces — the complete call chain for a single request.
• Spans — individual operations within a trace with timestamps and metadata.

Example of use: when processing an HTTP request, a microservice creates a span, which can spawn child spans when calling other services. Tools like Jaeger, Zipkin, or OpenTelemetry collect this data for visualization and analysis.

This helps quickly diagnose problems in complex distributed systems and improve performance.