The value of distributed tracing

Modern applications are built from many services that work together to fulfill a single user request. When something is slow or broken, logs and metrics can tell you what happened, but they rarely tell you where it happened across that chain of services.

Distributed tracing follows a single request end-to-end as it passes through each service. With traces, you can answer questions like “Which service is causing this latency?” or “Where did this error originate?” Paired with logs and metrics, traces complete the observability picture.

With distributed tracing through observability, you can:

• Identify latency bottlenecks and pinpoint the slowest service or span in a request
• Understand service dependencies and visualize how requests flow between services
• Correlate failures with deploys by inspecting spans around a regression
• Reduce mean time to resolution by jumping directly from a failing span to logs and metrics
• Analyze RED signals (rate, errors, duration) per service
• Debug in production safely using sampled trace data instead of production breakpoints

In the next milestone, you learn about the specific advantages of using the Tempo data source in Grafana Cloud.