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Software Engineering vocabulary · Debugging and Troubleshooting

Tracing

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

/ˈtreɪsɪŋ/nounAdvanced term

In software engineering, tracing means: Following a single request as it passes through many services, recording how long each step takes, so you can see where time is lost or errors happen.

In Turkish: dağıtık izleme, iz sürme, tracing

How it is used

Usually 'distributed tracing'. One request produces a trace, made of spans (one per step), linked by a trace ID. Tools include Jaeger, Zipkin and OpenTelemetry. Very useful with microservices.

Example sentences

  1. Distributed tracing showed that 80 percent of the response time was spent waiting for the stock service.

  2. Add the trace ID to every log line so tracing and logs can be linked.

Common collocations

  • distributed tracing
  • trace ID
  • tracing data
  • enable tracing
  • observabilityHow well you can understand what is happening inside a system from the data it produces, especially logs, metrics and traces, even for problems nobody predicted.
  • logA record of events, messages and errors that a program writes while it runs, used later to understand what happened. Also a verb: to log an error.
  • metricA number measured regularly over time to show how a system is behaving, such as CPU use, memory, request count or error rate.
  • latencyThe time a request or piece of data takes to travel through a system and get a response, usually measured in milliseconds.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Debugging and Troubleshooting

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