Last updated June 5th 2024

What is Distributed Tracing for Microservices Architectures? The Complete 2025 Guide

Enable distributed tracing to troubleshoot performance issues.

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What is Distributed Tracing for Microservices Architectures?

With the rise of microservices architectures, tracking requests across multiple services and components becomes crucial for understanding application performance. This use case highlights the distributed tracing capabilities provided by APM and Observability vendors, enabling businesses to identify and troubleshoot performance issues across complex, distributed systems.

Products for Distributed Tracing for Microservices Architectures

We’ve listed the products and solutions that commonly address the Distributed Tracing for Microservices Architectures use case below.

Dynatrace logo

Dynatrace provides an APM that supports diverse languages, architectures, and applications. It offers real-time visibility into microservices, automatic discovery and monitoring of Kubernetes workloads, and end-to-end visibility.

SigNoz logo

SigNoz offers advanced observability, providing real-time insights into application performance.

Highlight.io logo

Highlight.io is a cutting-edge APM solution, offering real-time visibility into application behavior.

Logz.io logo

Logz.io is a comprehensive observability platform, offering real-time analytics for logs, metrics, and traces.

LogicMonitor logo

LogicMonitor provides end-to-end observability, ensuring visibility into IT infrastructure and application performance.

DX APM logo

DX APM focuses on traditional APM. While it excels in monitoring app performance, it's not a complete observability platform. DX APM offers insights into health, utilization, and user experience.

AppDynamics logo

AppDynamics tightly integrates automation (AIOps) features with its APM, enabling organizations to automate processes and gain valuable insights into application performance.

Elastic APM logo

Elastic's observability platform is built on search tools and the ELK stack, providing powerful monitoring capabilities for modern infrastructure. It offers comprehensive insights into system performance.

New Relic logo

New Relic, one of the original APM solutions, has rebuilt its product to meet the requirements of a modern observability platform, providing comprehensive monitoring and insights and data ingestion based pricing.

ServiceNow Cloud Observability logo

Formerly Lightstep, ServiceNow Cloud Observability is an observability platform specializing in monitoring and tracing challenges in microservice-based environments, enabling organizations to gain deep visibility into their distributed systems.

Sumo Logic logo

Sumo Logic is a cloud-native service offering real-time, machine data analytics across the application lifecycle. It facilitates automated monitoring, log management, and security analytics, aiding businesses to promptly address and resolve issues.

Honeycomb logo

Honeycomb provides insights into real-time software behavior, surpassing traditional APMs. It has event-level system probing, and facilitates understanding of patterns and anomalies. It's ideal for rapid debugging in modern architectures.

Instana logo

Instana is part of the IBM portfolio and is unique in offering near-comprehensive real-time metric instrumentation, empowering users with precise and timely insights into their applications.

Splunk Observability Cloud logo

Splunk Observability Cloud delivers end-to-end visibility, tracing and AI-driven troubleshooting to aid in issue identification and resolution. It also facilitates continuous code profiling and service bottleneck identification.

Lumigo logo

Lumigo provides advanced observability for serverless architectures, enabling rapid issue resolution.

Chronosphere logo

Chronosphere delivers scalable and reliable observability, supporting organizations in managing complex environments.

Datadog APM logo

Datadog, a cloud monitoring pioneer, offers a comprehensive portfolio of monitoring services including APM. It provides advanced monitoring solutions for cloud-native companies.

Grafana logo

Grafana is a versatile observability platform, empowering users with comprehensive insights into system metrics.

Distributed Tracing for Microservices Architectures Features

Customize these feature priorities in Taloflow and get expert ratings for 15 different vendors and solutions, including None.

Feature Dimensions Description Priority
Comprehensive and Integrated Metrics, Logs and Tracing under Developer Control
  • Observability
Allows developers to have control over instrumenting their code. Critical
Suitable for Diverse Application Architectures
  • Use Case Fit
Can cover a wide range of architectures and combinations, including microservices, SOA, monolith, N-tier, and hybrid. Critical
Suitable for Purely Modern Microservice Architectures
  • Use Case Fit
Focussed on the unique debugging needs of microservice-based architectures, which consist of loosely-coupled and independent services. Critical
Language Independent Agent with Dynamic Instrumentation
  • Instrumentation
The agent will monitor your hosts, logs, apps, containers, etc. without any configuration necessary. Important
Open Platform Supporting Third Party Agents (OTEL/Prometheus)
  • Instrumentation
Supports Prometheus and provides more portability if ever you want to change your observability stack by instrumenting your code using the OTEL open source protocol. Important
Visible Metrics in <1 Second
  • Observability
Delivers metrics in the UI or dashboard in near real-time. Important
Enterprise SSO/SAML
  • Compliance
Offers SSO/SAML 2.0 to its customers. Nice To Have
Role-based Access Control (RBAC)
The organization can set up advanced access limits for individuals based on their role and filter queries for performance monitoring. Nice To Have
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