Distributed Tracing Working Group

The mission of the Distributed Tracing is to define standards for interoperability between tracing tools.
Modern cloud-native applications are highly distributed and often span multiple technology and vendor boundaries. The complexity of these applications requires a detailed understanding of how individual requests are executed. This is referred to as "tracing".
Tracing tools for collecting this information have been available for quite some time. However, these tools have not been built with interoperability in mind. This leaves the developer with a number of challenges in getting an end-to-end trace of complex transactions:

• Traces are often broken, because trace context information is lost in a contributing tier or the trace is restarted
• Vendors cannot pass proprietary information across tiers instrumented with a different implementation and therefore lose relevant information (e.g. step count, server information, ...)
• End users don't have the ability to create complete end-to-end traces of application transactions which are monitored by different tools, as there is no defined data format and semantics for trace data

The scope of this working group is the definition of data formats and headers enabling the propagation and correlation of tracing data across different implementations.