Benefits of Distributed Tracing

End-to-End Visibility of the user request across the entire system of microservices

Provides information about service dependencies

Metrics and observability

Resiliency when the system encounters a failure

Distributed Tracing vs Logging

There is always confusion between tracing and logging. Distributed tracing and logging can be used in an application to debug the issue and improve the areas where needed. But they are not the same.

Logging is the process of printing information or errors from an application to analyze what happened within that application whereas distributed tracing is the process of tracing a request from the first microservice until the last one it travels to find out where the failure has happened.

The idea is to start with logging in all the microservices and once the system grows complex, then tracing must be added across services. The metrics have to be monitored