What is Distributed Tracing?
Turkish: Dağıtık İzleme (Distributed Tracing)
Distributed tracing follows a request across services with a trace identifier, showing where latency, errors, or retries occur.
What is Distributed Tracing?
Distributed tracing shows how a single user request moves across services, queues, databases, and external APIs. Traditional logs expose each service’s local view. A trace connects those views under one request identity.
The basic model uses traces and spans. A trace is the full journey of a request; a span is one step, such as a payment service call, database query, or shipping API request. Trace context is propagated through HTTP headers or message metadata. OpenTelemetry is a common standard for collecting this data and sending it to different observability tools.
Why It Matters
In a distributed architecture, saying “checkout is slow” is not specific enough. Teams need to know whether the delay comes from inventory, the payment provider, a database, or a retry loop. In microservice systems, distributed tracing makes latency chains and error propagation visible.
Storing every trace in production can be expensive, so sampling, sensitive data masking, and retention windows need careful design. Tracing does not answer every operational question on its own, but together with metrics and logs it is one of the most valuable signals in observability.
Related Terms
APM tracks application latency, errors, transactions, and resource use so teams can diagnose performance issues in production.
MicroserviceMicroservice architecture designs a large application as small services that can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently.
ObservabilityObservability is the ability to understand a system's internal state from its external outputs (logs, metrics, traces) — a key DevOps principle.
OpenTelemetryOpenTelemetry is an open-source framework for collecting logs, metrics, and traces in a standard format for application observability.