.NET Architecture & System Design Interview Question #149

What is distributed tracing?

Resilience, Rate Limiting, Health Checks & Observability Senior Advanced

Quick Interview Answer

Distributed tracing follows a request or workflow across multiple services and dependencies. Each operation is represented by a span, and related spans share a trace context.

Detailed Explanation

Distributed tracing follows a request or workflow across multiple services and dependencies. Each operation is represented by a span, and related spans share a trace context.

Tracing helps identify where latency and failures occur in a distributed call path. Context must be propagated across HTTP calls and messaging boundaries for the trace to remain connected.

Code Example

Trace 8f2...
Client
  -> API span
      -> Orders span
          -> SQL span
          -> Payment span