Backend & systems·Observability and operations
you follow one slow request across six services and see exactly which hop ate eight hundred milliseconds.
Distributed tracing
Also calledrequest tracing, OpenTelemetry
Recording causally linked timing spans for a single request as it crosses process boundaries. It is the only tool that answers "where did the time go" in a distributed system. It requires context propagation through every hop, including queues, and one un-instrumented service breaks the chain for everything behind it.