Why it matters

Distributed tracing essential for microservices. Cloud Trace is GCP standard.

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The architecture

Traces: automatic for GCP services + custom via OpenTelemetry.

UI shows call graph + latency.

Cloud Trace flowAuto instrumentationGCP servicesOpenTelemetrycustom codeTrace explorerUI + analysisSample intelligently: full trace all is expensive at scale
Trace pipeline.
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How it works end to end

Sampling: probabilistic + priority-based.

Span attributes: enrich with context.

Analysis: identify slow paths.

Integration with metrics + logs (correlation).