Comparison
Data lineagevsDistributed tracing
Data lineage
the number is wrong and you need to know every table between it and the source, without reading forty SQL files.
The recorded graph of which datasets are derived from which, ideally parsed from the transformation code rather than maintained by hand. It is what makes both directions of an incident tractable: upstream to find the cause, downstream to find who else is now wrong. Hand-maintained lineage is worse than none, because it is trusted and stale at the same time.
Full entry →Distributed tracing
you follow one slow request across six services and see exactly which hop ate eight hundred milliseconds.
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.
Full entry →