What term describes the end-to-end journey of a request across services in a distributed system?

• A. Logs
• B. Metrics
• C. Traces
• D. Path tracking

Answer: (C)

Tracing captures the end-to-end journey of a request as it moves through multiple services. It attaches a unique trace identifier to the request and propagates it across all services, with each service recording a span that marks its work, start and end times, and metadata. The collection of these spans forms a trace, revealing the full path the request took and where time is spent, so you can understand dependencies, latency hotspots, and failures in a distributed system. Logs are individual events from a single service, not the whole path; metrics are aggregated numbers describing performance at a higher level; path tracking isn’t the standard term used for this end-to-end view.