Spans are fundamental building blocks of distributed tracing. A single trace in distributed tracing consists of a series of tagged time intervals know

Spans - a key concept of distributed tracing

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2022-01-20 14:30:08

Spans are fundamental building blocks of distributed tracing. A single trace in distributed tracing consists of a series of tagged time intervals known as spans. Spans represent a logical unit of work in completing a user request or transaction.

Distributed tracing is critical to application performance monitoring in microservice-based architecture. Before we deep dive into spans, let's have a brief overview of distributed tracing.

In a microservices architecture, a user request travels through hundreds, even thousands of services before serving the user what they need. Engineering teams often responsible for maintaining single services have no visibility over how the system performs as a whole.

Distributed tracing gives insights into how a particular service is performing as part of the whole in a distributed software system. It involves passing a trace context with each user request which is then passed across hosts, services, and protocols to track the user request.

What are spans in distributed tracing? In distributed tracing, a user request or a transaction is represented by a trace. Traces are broken down into multiple spans. Spans represent a single logical operation within a trace. For example, a function call during a user request can be represented by a span.