DevOps Intermediate
Distributed Tracing — Patterns and Best Practices¶
Distributed TracingObservabilityMicroservices 5 min read
Principles of distributed tracing. Context propagation, span design, correlation IDs and debugging in practice.
Why Distributed Tracing¶
In a monolith, a stack trace is enough. In microservices, a request passes through dozens of services — without tracing, debugging is a nightmare.
- Trace — the entire path of a request through the system
- Span — a single operation (HTTP call, DB query)
- Context Propagation — passing trace IDs between services
Context Propagation¶
# W3C Trace Context (standard)
traceparent: 00-4bf92f3577b34da6a3ce929d0e0e4736-00f067aa0ba902b7-01
tracestate: vendor=value
# In code (Go + OTel)
import "go.opentelemetry.io/otel/propagation"
// Middleware automatically extracts/injects context
handler := otelhttp.NewHandler(mux, "api-server")
// When calling a downstream service
ctx := r.Context()
req, _ := http.NewRequestWithContext(ctx, "GET", url, nil)
otel.GetTextMapPropagator().Inject(ctx, propagation.HeaderCarrier(req.Header))
Span Design¶
- Name spans by operation:
HTTP GET /api/orders - Add meaningful attributes:
order.id,user.id - Use span events for important moments
- Set status to ERROR with error description
- Don’t over-granulate — a span per for-loop iteration is an anti-pattern
Summary¶
Distributed tracing is essential for debugging and performance analysis of microservices. W3C Trace Context is the standard, OpenTelemetry the best implementation.
Need Help with Implementation?¶
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