Learning Full-stack Observability: Tracing

(Originally published on Medium , Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay ) Introduction Distributed Tracing serves the purpose of connecting network calls across various services within an organization. In my case, that means I can: From Android: see the time taken for the request to get sent from the device From Spring Boot: see the potential error logs a certain user may have From the database: see how much time is spent to determine the efficiency of my queries Traces are made of spans, and spans have attributes, and a span may have a parent span. A span without a parent is known as the root span. More about that in the OpenTelemetry documentation In this example: The root span is named GET , starting at the Android app. It’s composed of 5 spans, 3 of which are database queries, and the longest-running one is the root. The next span after the app starts at the backend The trace took 1.91 seconds in total. As mentioned before, my choice of tools for OpenTelemetry will be the ones from th