Distributed Tracing - CI/CD Glossary Definition

Distributed tracing follows a single request as it travels across multiple services, stitching together the timing of each hop into one trace so you can see where latency and errors originate.

How it works

Each service records spans and propagates a shared trace context (for example W3C traceparent headers). A backend like Jaeger, Tempo, or an OpenTelemetry collector reassembles the spans into a trace tree.

Tracing pipelines

The same idea applies to CI/CD: instrumenting pipeline stages as spans reveals which step (checkout, dependency install, test, deploy) dominates total run time.

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