# What is Distributed Tracing?

> Following one request across every service it touches, with timing for each hop.

Canonical: https://www.decimal.app/glossary/distributed-tracing · Last reviewed: 2026-09-23

Distributed tracing records the path of a single request through a system made of many services. Each step is a span with timing and metadata, and spans share a trace ID so the whole journey can be viewed together.

## Why it matters

When a customer reports 'it's slow' or 'it failed once', a trace is often the only way to see which service caused it. Without one, engineers guess across dozens of services.

## Best practices

1. Propagate trace IDs to the edge. Return them in error responses so customers and support can quote them.
2. Tag spans with account IDs. Makes it possible to find one customer's requests.
3. Sample errors at 100%. Keep every failing trace even if you sample successes.

## How Decimal helps

Decimal connects to observability tools such as Datadog and SigNoz to pull the traces behind a customer's report and point to the failing span.

## Related terms

- [Observability](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/observability): How well you can understand a system's internal state from the data it emits.
- [Logs](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/logs): Timestamped records of events a system emits as it runs.
- [Root Cause Analysis (RCA)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/root-cause-analysis): Finding the underlying reason a problem happened, not just its symptoms.
- [Cannot Reproduce](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/cannot-reproduce): The status a ticket gets when engineering can't make the bug happen on their side.

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