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Distributed tracing records the path of a request through the various services that make up an application. It is used to tie information about different units of work together, to understand a whole chain of events in a distributed transaction. The units of work might be executed in different processes or hosts.

Distributed tracing overview

As a service owner, you can use distributed tracing to instrument your services to gather insights into your service architecture. You can use distributed tracing for monitoring, network profiling, and troubleshooting the interaction between components in modern, cloud-native, microservices-based applications.

With distributed tracing you can perform the following functions:

  • Monitor distributed transactions

  • Optimize performance and latency

  • Perform root cause analysis

Red Hat OpenShift distributed tracing consists of two main components:

  • Red Hat OpenShift distributed tracing platform - This component is based on the open source Jaeger project.

  • Red Hat OpenShift distributed tracing data collection - This component is based on the open source OpenTelemetry project.

Both of these components are based on the vendor-neutral OpenTracing APIs and instrumentation.