In my day-to-day work, I am fortunate enough to have access to a lot of tools that give me insight into our running services, including data collection and visualizations of distributed traces. Distributed tracing at its core shows the flow of requests through the various services that they are handled by and usually includes the information about the time they take in each service, along with some special plumbing that allows a particular connection, or event, or action to be tracked across those different systems so they can be correlated. Based on the sheer volume of the data of tracking and tracing requests across different processes on different systems in a network, the thing that makes the traced data useful is good data being fed into good visualization tools.
