With serverless and containerized applications becoming increasingly distributed, monitoring becomes more complicated due to siloed and incomplete telemetry. Distributed tracing brings great value by enabling end-to-end visibility in modern and complex applications, facilitating robust monitoring and tracking of processes at every stage to identify performance bottlenecks and failures, diagnose issues, and fix them. The importance of distributed tracing is undisputed, but many organizations struggle with deciding whether to build or buy a distributed tracing solution due to the complexity of implementing it from scratch. Distributed tracing has two approaches - agent-based and agentless - with agent-based tracing requiring installation of an agent on the system being monitored, potentially impacting performance, while agentless tracing uses unique identifiers for requests flowing through services without impacting performance. A good distributed tracing system should have characteristics such as accuracy, reliability, efficiency, compliance, and ease of use. Building a solution can be quick but hard to master, especially as complexity increases with service and team count growth. Buying a solution allows leveraging leading observability solutions without investing time and resources in building one from scratch, minimizing effort to achieve coverage of the distributed-tracing system. The cost of maintaining an in-house system is often underestimated due to difficulty measuring effort and time spent on developing and operating it, making procurement of a solution a challenge for many organizations. Ultimately, building or buying a monitoring tool depends on unique business needs, architectural complexity, and the expectation of needing customized monitoring for serverless applications.