Distributed tracing is a technique used to help understand and gain insight into the behavior of a distributed system by tracking the flow of requests and transactions across different services. It provides a holistic view of the system, allowing engineers to identify issues, faults, bottlenecks, and performance problems. To implement distributed tracing, code or libraries need to be written that generate and propagate trace context, record spans, and describe what each component is doing. Distributed tracing tools, such as Lumigo, can help analyze data, visualize bottlenecks, and provide alerts for errors, making it easier to debug and identify issues in a distributed system. Implementing effective monitoring and alerting strategies with metrics like latency, throughput, error rate, availability, and recovery time objective (RTO) is crucial to minimize downtime. By following best practices such as using resilient databases, implementing redundant systems and infrastructure, and regularly testing for failure scenarios, engineers can build robust and scalable distributed applications with distributed tracing.