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Instrument for distributed tracing

Client instrumentation is the first building block to a functioning distributed tracing visualization pipeline. Instrumentation handles how traces are generated. To learn more about instrumentation, refer to About instrumentation.

Instrumentation is the act of modifying the source code of a service to emit span information tied to a common trace ID. Traces themselves are a meta-object, comprised of nothing but spans that hold the same ID.

To instrument your application or service, you need to:

1. Set up instrumentation to generate traces
2. Set up a collector to receive traces from your application