Observability as a superpower

Tracing is an essential tool for observability and debugging applications. It involves capturing the route that a request takes through an application, represented by traces made up of spans. Each span represents a unit of work with attributes such as ID, name, start and end time, and links to its parent span's ID. Tracing can help identify inefficiencies, understand the order of events, and spot slow parts within applications. Using tools like OpenTelemetry, developers can add custom spans from within their codebase for better visibility into application behavior. Incorporating tracing with logging and error reporting provides a comprehensive understanding of system performance and helps engineers quickly identify and fix issues.