While I 100% agree that having doing most of the tracing at the sidecar level is the right call, you'll still need "some" application-level awareness of tracing

While I 100% agree that having doing most of the tracing at the sidecar level is the right call, you'll still need "some" application-level awareness of tracing (e.g. passing along b3 headers: https://github.com/openzipkin/b3-propagation https://github.com/openzipkin/b3-propagation ), or you won't be able to match various spans to a common trace and lose a _lot_ of value from your distributed tracing.