Spans and traces
When looking at distributed tracing, there are two common terms that you will see repeatedly: span and trace. A span is the smallest unit that is tracked in distributed tracing, and represents an individual process getting a request and returning a response. As the process makes requests to other services in order to do its work, it passes information along with the request so that the service being requested can create its own span and reference the requesting one. Each of these spans is collected and exported from each process, gathered up, and can then be analyzed. A full collection of spans that are all working together is called a trace.
Adding, gathering, and transferring all this additional information is additional ...
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