In microservices, distributed tracing is a method for aggregating all the operations that occur in your distributed systems that were triggered by a specific request. If these traces are visualized, developers can gain insights into how their service behaves when it’s run with other services, which helps them understand why errors occur.

Let’s say we have an issue in production. We’ve all been there, right? The first thing we want to be able to do is reproduce the issue. By reproducing, we can confirm it’s a recurring issue, rather than a sporadic one, and that it requires a fix to ensure that our product is working properly. When shifting from a monolith to microservices, reproducing issues becomes more of a challenge.