Think of it like a stack trace, except across processes. You have to instrument your code and libraries to pass along a context that gets picked up by each pie

Think of it like a stack trace, except across processes. You have to instrument your code and libraries to pass along a context that gets picked up by each piece along the call tree, and then each piece gets reported to a collector. It's useful for microservices, and even for non-distributed web services if you have heavyweight libraries that it must interact with (databases, caches, queues, etc). It only really works if all of the pieces understand each other, thus the OpenTelemetry [1] initiative. [1] https://opentelemetry.io/ https://opentelemetry.io/