Alauda Container Platform

About Distributed Tracing

Alauda Distributed Tracing records how a single request travels across services in a distributed application. It helps teams follow request paths end to end, understand latency across service boundaries, and troubleshoot failures in cloud-native microservice environments.

In a microservices architecture, one user action often triggers work across multiple services, databases, message queues, and infrastructure components. Distributed tracing correlates these units of work into a single trace so operators can analyze the full execution path instead of inspecting each service in isolation.

A trace represents the complete path of a request through the system. Each trace contains one or more spans, and each span records a logical unit of work, including the operation name, start time, duration, and related metadata. Parent-child span relationships show how upstream and downstream operations are connected.

Alauda Distributed Tracing provides the following capabilities:

  • End-to-end request visibility for viewing the complete execution path of distributed transactions
  • Latency analysis for identifying slow services, operations, or downstream dependencies
  • Root cause analysis for locating failures across service boundaries
  • Scalable trace storage and query based on Jaeger with multiple backends

Alauda Distributed Tracing works with Alauda Build of OpenTelemetry to receive, process, and forward trace data by using open telemetry standards such as OTLP. It can also integrate with Alauda Service Mesh so service-to-service traffic and trace data can be analyzed together during troubleshooting.

Note
Because Alauda Distributed Tracing releases on a different cadence from Alauda Container Platform, the Alauda Distributed Tracing documentation is now available as a separate documentation set at Alauda Distributed Tracing.