Distributed Tracing with OpenTelemetry & Tempo

Trace Context Propagation

To trace a transaction crossing 6 microservices:

1. Edge gateway generates a traceparent header conforming to W3C standards: 00-4bf92f3577b34da6a3ce929d0e0e4736-00f067aa0ba902b7-01.
2. Each downstream service extracts the span context, creates child spans, and transmits telemetry to OpenTelemetry Collector.
3. Storage engines like Grafana Tempo index trace IDs for instant correlation with Prometheus metrics and Loki logs.