Traces
Traces are a fundamental concept in distributed systems and observability that represent the end-to-end journey of a request or transaction as it flows through multiple services and components. They provide a detailed, chronological record of events, including spans (individual operations) and their relationships, enabling developers to understand system behavior, performance bottlenecks, and failures. This is crucial for debugging, monitoring, and optimizing complex applications in microservices or cloud-native architectures.
Developers should learn and use traces when building or maintaining distributed systems, such as microservices, serverless applications, or cloud-based platforms, to gain visibility into request flows and identify latency issues, errors, or dependencies. They are essential for observability practices, helping teams troubleshoot performance problems, ensure reliability, and improve user experience by pinpointing where delays or failures occur across interconnected services.