You can implement distributed tracing with logs if every player in the system is propagating the headers appropriately. Tools like NewRelic APM and XRay will ta

You can implement distributed tracing with logs if every player in the system is propagating the headers appropriately. Tools like NewRelic APM and XRay will take care of that bit mostly for you. Service mesh data planes have a wider scope, but they do make it much easier to implement distributed tracing (I think Istio includes this out of the box). In the end though these tools can’t replace app logs because they only let you reconstruct what happens in between services, not internal to them.