The Question
Design
Distributed Tracing System
Design a distributed tracing solution for a microservices architecture. The system should track service-to-service requests end-to-end, collect span data with minimal overhead, correlate traces across heterogeneous services, and provide a queryable interface for performance monitoring and root-cause analysis.
ElasticSearch
Kafka
OpenTelemetry
Sampling
Distributed Context Propagation
February 7, 2026