Tell me about tracing — what is it used for?

Tracing is the process of detailed monitoring of program or system execution, recording the sequence of operations, function calls, their execution times, and interactions between components.

It is used for:

• Finding and diagnosing errors and bottlenecks in application performance.
• Performance analysis and identifying delays.
• Understanding the behavior of complex distributed systems.

For example, in microservices architecture, tracing helps track the request path through multiple services, identify where delays occur, and optimize interactions.

Tracing tools (such as Jaeger, Zipkin) collect and visualize this data, making analysis easier and improving software quality.